

John Gruber: The iPad - georgekv
http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/the_ipad

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gr366
_I think Amazon would do well to add color support to Kindle e-books for use
on iPads and iPhones._

The Kindle app for iPad already supports color. I downloaded the Kindle sample
of the graphic novel "The Impostor's Daughter", and it displays in glorious
color (and has more pages than the iBooks sample of the same work).

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iamcalledrob
"Those of you who doubt that the pixels-per-inch resolution isn’t high enough,
just wait until you see the type rendering on this summer’s new iPhones."

Hmm, well that's interesting.

~~~
wmf
Gruber has a history of making very specific "predictions" which are actually
leaks from his moles. Maybe he's gotten tired of beating around the bush.

~~~
jsz0
On MacBreak Weekly he eluded to the fact that some high profile developers are
presently working on apps for the next iPhone. I'm sure we'll see some demos
tomorrow.

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inimino
"Alluded" (to mention in passing), not "eluded" (to evade).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allusion>

~~~
stcredzero
I wonder if some future politician isn't going to "elude" to something in
order to get away with something else. (With an American public which is much
less literate than past generations.)

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lawrence
I enjoyed his "curious choice" description of Apple choosing to go with
default wallpaper that looks like a series of deep scratches on the screen.
Glad I wasn't the only one who gasped "crap, it's scratched!" when I booted it
up.

~~~
jackowayed
Yeah, when I went to the Apple store to play with one, I thought for like 5
seconds that it was scratched (as floor models on electronics are sometimes
beaten up, though usually not 2 days after launch). Then I felt for the
scratches and didn't feel them, and then I opened an app, fixing the screen
heroically!

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g89
In regards to his criticism of syncing, I think it seems like such an
obviously missing feature that Apple has to do something about it, namely
opening up MobileMe/iWork.com for free (ad-supported) to offer proper
competition to Google.

I wrote some more thoughts on this here, if anyone's interested:
[http://gen89.net/2010/04/07/prediction-free-mobileme-
after-a...](http://gen89.net/2010/04/07/prediction-free-mobileme-after-apple-
builds-its-new-data-centre/)

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zacharypinter
His notes on MobileSafari were interesting. If the iPad is having a hard time
keeping a couple of pages in memory due to the lack of traditional virtual
memory, then it makes even more sense why Apple is avoiding Flash. Not just
the CPU/battery issue, flash is notoriously bad at garbage collecting.

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signa11
>One thing that’s making it hard for some people to grasp the purpose of the
iPad is that no one has an answer to what precisely it is for.

after thinking a bit about it for a while, ipad to me, seems to be more of a
media consumption device than either a computer or a phone. i can read books,
play video-games etc on it, and it seems to be of the just right form-factor
for such activities. given that, i don't think i would be interested in
running any arbitrary program on it. i would prefer my computer for doing
that. apple store thus becomes more of a alternate clearing-house of published
information. i am probably more concerned about some fundamental erosion of
fair-use-rights here than anything else, as building strict copyright controls
on such a device is probably much simpler . if content-providers/distributors
find ipad to be a viable platform for disseminating media, then copyright
would be back with a vengeance. libraries / physical books might then be
passe...

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aphyr
The iphone and ipad lack virtual memory? They can't be serious... it's a Mach
kernel. Maybe he means swap?

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philwelch
That explains the lack of multitasking. Multitasking would work if background
apps just swapped to disk and slept. The current guidance for developers (on
exit, save state; on startup, restore state) is a poor man's version of swap.

~~~
kvs
Yup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1240171>

I also wonder how useful virtual memory would be on a device like iPad/iPhone.
With limited memory and no multitasking how often would address fragmentation
be an issue.

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ROFISH
Virtual memory (memory paging and segmentation) is the foundation for being
able to start and stop apps. Otherwise memory would have to be defragmented.
Both don't require the ability to store somewhere, they both are useful in
physical memory only situations.

I think what he means in the article is that Apple disabled Mach's ability to
store memory pages on disk in order to free room for more physical memory. The
most probable reason being that Apple does not trust the lifetime write
capacity of their Flash disk. (And depending on your chicken and egg, the
current App situation does not require swapping memory pages to disk since you
can only run one App at a time. Which caused the other I don't know.)

~~~
glhaynes
I'd guess the most probable reason is to reduce interface stuttering.

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philwelch
Interface stuttering due to swap is an issue on PC's due to hard drive
latency, but would it be as much of an issue with solid state storage?

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rictic
Well, even assuming that they're using top quality solid state storage, you're
going from (at worst) hundreds of nanoseconds per retrieval to (at best) a
hundred microseconds per (page) retrieval. Still very significant for some
data access patterns.

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rortian
Very interesting review. It's very hard to say this was sycophantic.

I was very surprised with how primitive the iWork document management was.
Also, can you imagine being that constrained when web browsing? I need my
tabs.

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stcredzero
Funny, but I browsed just as if I had tabs. I effectively had tabs. What I
missed was "Open In New Tab.". Instead of concurrently opening, I have to wait
for each page.

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ra88it
Do you know that you can tap and hold on a hyperlink to bring up a context
menu which offers the option "Open in new page"? Where 'page' is functionally
equivalent to 'tab'.

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KirinDave
It's strange how people say that iPad browsing is tabless. That's true, but it
sort of ignores the point. Might as well say Omniweb is tabless.

~~~
stcredzero
Tabbed browsing in desktop browsers also brings concurrency with it. On my
Macbook, I can open lots of links "In New Tab" and read them as they load, so
not have to wait for any one of them to load except the first one. With the
iPad, I have to wait for every single page.

~~~
KirinDave
You actually don't.

The interface throws you to a new page, but you can go back to your previous
page/tab without waiting for the current one to load and it will finish on its
own unless the browser runs out of memory.

The interface does a poor job of exposing this feature.

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Dellort
iPad review: It sucks.

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proee
maybe so, but the community here wants to know WHY?

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mpk
It requires iTunes to load content from local storage.

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martythemaniak
Wow, John Grubber loves an Apple product?! What's next, the sun rising from
the east tomorrow morning?

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jsz0
In Mr. Grubber's defense there's a lot more substance in this review than a
thumb up/down conclusion. It's obviously written by and for Apple fans.
Friendly critiques are often more valuable than unfriendly ones. I don't want
to read a review by someone preaching to me that I need Flash or a command
prompt so I can edit my /etc/rc.local file. I'm more interested in a strong
focus on the small details of design along with commentary about the bigger
picture from someone I agree with on the basics and has a proven track record
of understanding Apple.

Would you rather read a review of a new sushi restaurant from a sushi lover,
someone who never tried sushi before, or someone who hates sushi? Same idea
here.

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mattmaroon
I'd like to read it from someone who is a sushi lover, but doesn't make their
living writing about how great that restaurant's particular chef is.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
In all fairness, Gruber makes a good portion of his living _complaining_ about
the things he dislikes about Apple's products and processes. He's one of the
few Apple fans I know of that has openly (and intelligently) criticized the
AppStore for multiple reasons.

~~~
mattmaroon
Yeah but it often feels hollow, like Fox News having Colmes. It's a ruse
(albeit an effective one) to establish trust.

