iPad Links: Friday, April 30, 2010

My iPad will be delayed. I have had newborn kittens dropped on me. Tech doesn’t die. Kittens can. Tech can wait.

1: Defend Your Research: Powerful People Are Better Liars
2: Power and Moral Hypocrisy
Costly IRS Mandate Slipped into Health Bill

Q&A: HP’s strategy chief on the Palm acquisition
The Real Story Behind Adobe’s Failed Mobile Strategy
Adobe CEO, Ex-Adobe Engineers Weigh In on Jobs’ Flash Attack
Open Letter to Steve Jobs
My Android Experience by the Numbers
Thinking Big About Small Business
Using social media: Hackers penetrate mid-level bank IT network

1: ‘99ers’ dread future without jobless benefits
2: Gambling with Other People’s Money
3: Laid Off – A Reader’s Story
4: Under Water
5: Dana From Decatur. “I Got 99 Problems, But Your Paper Ain’t One.”

I can’t seem to master the whole “lack of knowledge + apathy = entitled brat” equation

iPad:
Communal computing
Stross sees: The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash
iPad Wallpapers Thread
The iPad and the Future of Text
Why the iPad is not for web browsing (yet)

UI/Web Design:
When can I use…
The web sucks. Browsers need to innovate
Open is not enough. Time to raise the bar: Interoperable
Rise and fall of a UI convention: The search bubble
TouchScroll, a scrolling layer for WebKit mobile
HTML5 Extensibility
What’s Wrong With CSS

Publishing:
The Tablet and reading the future
In L.A, New Media Meets Publishing
Pick this Nit: Null Path URIs and the Pedantic Web
How The North Face Became The North Farce
Fake Steve in top form: That’s right, Michael Wolff, I run the bookstore. I’m also now your editor. In fact, I’m the editor of the entire world!

Writing/Writers:
A non-website: Jeffrey Lewis
An ISBN That Could Hurt
Authors Unbound Online
George Bernard Shaw’s Shackitecture
The Readers Project
Ebert: Why I Hate 3-D (And You Should Too)

I have the sense that younger Hollywood is losing the instinctive feeling for story and quality that generations of executives possessed. It’s all about the marketing.

It’s iPad 3G Day And I Got … Kittens!

I was going to put this in today’s Links post but people keep freakin asking me on Twitter.

No. I don’t have an iPad 3G yet.

What I have instead are three newborn kittens dropped on me.

The mother cat is less than a year old and the father of the kittens is her father too.

Things like this usually do not end well.

So, my iPad 3G is delayed until Kitten Watch is over, one way or the other.

Tech can wait. Tech doesn’t die. Kittens can.

Besides, as I type this post, the frikkin iPad 3G hasn’t even gone on sale yet at the Apple Store. That begins at 5PM EST.

hp Acquiring Palm: The Picture Version

I’ve been seeing a lot of commentary that entirely misses the point of hp acquiring Palm, so I hope this post will make everything clear for everybody.

Alphabet City, originally uploaded by antecanis.

That is the building hp used to live in. Windows and Android were the landlords. They didn’t care who they rented to and they didn’t care whether their renters liked what they provided, either.

When hp acquired Palm, it moved to something like this:

It’s not yet a sprawling mansion, but hp now owns it. It doesn’t have to adhere to any stinking rules by any stinking landlord. It can change things however it wants to suit its needs and doesn’t have to wait for any stinking landlord to make any improvements — it can do them whenever it wants! And it doesn’t have to pay rent to anybody!

Everyone else living in that Windows/Android slum — good luck getting anywhere with those two landlords!

hp has moved into Apple’s neighborhood.

Previously here:

ePub Books On webOS
Will hp Now Delay The Slate?
What Really Happened: Old Palm Bought New Palm!
Congratulations, Palm! Good Luck To HP!

R.I.P. Paper

How it has all changed.

World Color Press was so important to the publishing industry that June 18, 1977, was declared “World Color Press Day”

See some amazing stuff after the break.

ePub Books On webOS

Oh, this is totally off-topic. But my allegiance is not to Apple. It’s to writers (see this post).

Ibis Reader enables non-DRMed ePub eBooks to be read on any device that has a web browser.

After the break, see what it looks like running on my crap PC using a version of Firefox 2.x and then on webOS.

Will hp Now Delay The Slate?

Yes, I think so.

hp has to realize that Windows 7 isn’t going to provide them any lasting presence in the tablet market, so why continue that investment?

There’s been no official release date and the page for the Slate is still nothing but an email form.

There would be no shame in hp doing this. It set a precedent in changing things around when it dumped the underpowered VIA chip for the Atom in its netbooks.

I also have to think that webOS would allow hp to retool the design, getting rid of any hard drive and replacing it with flash storage, reducing its weight. They could probably retool it altogether and make it look less like an iPad.

What is going to be very interesting is that a webOS tablet could address the perceived shortcomings of the iPad. The big ones being the lack of an SD slot and a USB port to connect directly to devices such as cameras (still/video).

It’s my personal hope that hp will adhere to our freedom of expression — unlike Apple — when it comes to publications. They can do what Apple cannot do: permit purchasing and installation from outside the current Palm App Catalog. hp should stay out of policing content. This would provide an additional competitive edge against the iPad. That would please publishers and writers very, very much.

What Really Happened: Old Palm Bought New Palm!

In the excitement of getting my initial post up, I neglected one detail that stood out once I saw it.

HP to Acquire Palm for $1.2 Billion

Palm’s innovative operating system provides an ideal platform to expand HP’s mobility strategy and create a unique HP experience spanning multiple mobile connected devices,” said Todd Bradley, executive vice president, Personal Systems Group, HP.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

He used to lead Old Palm!

Palm Chooses Head of Hardware Development

Palm, Inc. has just named Todd Bradley as president of its Palm Solutions Group.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

And:

Palm Inc Acquires Handspring

The merged company will be led by Bradley, who will continue as president and chief executive officer

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

So, isn’t that something?

It’s not exactly like Steve Jobs having Apple buy NeXT so he could turn around and get Apple back, but it does show just how small a world the field of tech is.

It also makes me wonder if Bradley has some unfulfilled dreams from his time at Palm. This will be very, very interesting!

Congratulations, Palm! Good Luck To HP!

Wow. I decided to play hooky from tech today — looking at some more bad comic books — and happened to peek into my Twitterstream to the astounding news of hp buying Palm.

This is a perfect match!

hp has a long history of being in the handheld and portable space, beginning from the time of calculators.

But what’s significant here is that hp created cult followings for its 95LX handheld computer, its OmniBook series, and purchased Compaq and inherited the iPaq cult. hp also created a cult following for its netbook entries, bringing something new to the segment that was pioneered by Asus.

So hp is no stranger to building products that create rabid and devoted fanbases. This is precisely what Palm needs — that know-how, that marketing, and, more than anything else, those engineering resources that rival Apple’s.

webOS now has a future — and it won’t be on cheap fall-apart devices. They’ll be swank and classy and, like hp’s netbooks, bring something new to the field.

And this has to say something about the viability of Android too. hp was planning at least one Android tablet. Attempting that must have taught them something. And that lesson caused them to acquire Palm.

Asus, you just lost big time! And Nokia, your death spiral is now unstoppable.

My only question is this: How soon can hp rip Windows 7 out of the Slate and replace it with webOS?

Previously here:

An iPad Competitor? Not In 2010!
When Will Lenovo And Asus Learn?

Apple Is Scaring Publishers And Writers

The contradictory — no, now it’s outright nonsensical — hand of Apple is at work, rejecting things again.

Creepy Steve Jobs May Not Want You to Read This (or Will Break Down Your Door)

Apple has rejected an app version of this column—which, on a relatively frequent basis goes out of its way to analyze the odd behavior of Steve Jobs.

[. . .]

The stated reason for the rejection of my free app is that Apple requires “sufficient amounts of content to appeal to a broad audience.” Putting aside the fact that this pretty much makes specialty content ineligible for iPhone or iPad apps, it’s also a pretty fudgy standard.

Indeed!

What if I wanted to publish an app that was a specialist’s tool? It could be anything. Some obscure aspect of metadata organization, or a compilation of medical research material, or even a collection of presentations about software theory, anything that would have a very limited yet actual audience. Is Apple going to deny me the chance to earn that money? Because, in Apple’s eyes, I’m not appealing to the great wad of people out there who own and buy its devices?

iPad Links: Tuesday, April 27, 2010

This one is so big, I must hide it behind a break.