Linked List: April 2, 2010

Friday, 2 April 2010

For journalists on deadline.

Joel Johnson Responds to Cory Doctorow ★

Joel Johnson:

I’m glad the Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards. I’m glad it encouraged a generation of kids to tinker and explore. I’m also glad that I don’t live in the fucking ’70s and have to type in programs from a magazine anymore.

Heather Champ Leaving Flickr to Start Online Community Consultancy ★

Flickr’s brain drain continues. What a great community Heather helped shape.

Gizmodo’s List of Essential iPad Apps ★

Tons of great apps already.

Netflix Available on iPad ★

Streaming movies and TV shows. Works great.

Google Services on the iPad ★

The Gmail interface looks good.

Andy Ihnatko, Jason Snell, and Yours Truly, Live on Clayton Morris’s Strategy Room ★

3pm Eastern today — about half an hour from now. Take a guess what we’ll be talking about.

Quake 2 Ported to HTML5 ★

Neat:

In the port, we use WebGL, the Canvas API, HTML 5 audio elements, the local storage API, and WebSockets to demonstrate the possibilities of pure web applications in modern browsers such as Safari and Chrome.

Update: Is it an April Fool’s joke? Why can’t they just link to a page where you can try it? Has anyone gotten this to work?

Update 2: Several readers report that it’s no joke. The FAQ states that they can’t post an online demo due to licensing issues for the resources.

Gina Trapani: ‘Why You Shouldn’t Buy an iPad (Yet)’ ★

Unlike Cory Doctorow, Gina (unsurprisingly) makes a reasonable argument:

Don’t be the guy who bought the first-gen iPad when Apple slashes the 2011 iPad price in half.

That’s possible, of course. Everyone remembers the big original iPhone price drop three months after it shipped. But: I think the original iPhone was priced high to start as a hedge — just in case it didn’t sell in huge quantities. And remember: the original iPhone, even at $600, was sold out for most of its first three months.

I think the iPad is already priced to move. I don’t think we’re going to see any price cuts.

Next year’s iPad will be faster, cheaper, less buggy, and have better apps and worthy competitors. Let all the deep-pocketed Jobs apostles be your canaries into the iPad coalmine. Give developers time to fix their apps to work well on the iPad. Give Apple a year to lower prices on faster hardware and fill in all the gaping feature holes. (Remember how long early iPhone owners lived without copy and paste?)

Now this is true. Next year there will be a second-gen iPad and it’ll be superior in many ways to the ones that ship tomorrow. I don’t think they’ll be cheaper, but they’ll be better. (Remember, though, that those who bought the original iPhone got copy-and-paste for free when it was added to the iPhone OS.)

I think the comparison to the original iPhone is perfect. Me? Getting the original iPhone on day one was the best money I’ve ever spent. If you bought an original iPhone and regretted it a year later, though, you probably ought to skip the original iPad.

iPad Claim Chowder: John Breeden ★

John Breeden is an iPad doubter:

I’ve been covering and reviewing notebooks and battery technology for the past decade, and I know what the current technology is capable of. There is no way that a 1.5-pound computer is going to be able to drive an IPS display for ten hours as Steve Jobs claims. It just can’t happen. Perhaps if you let the iPad lapse into standby mode, you could squeeze it. But if you are actually using the device, my estimate would be less than three hours of power, and that’s being generous. The display would look amazing, but be quite a power hog.

Unless Apple has also developed some new type of power source, such as nuclear cells or magical hamsters on tiny spinning wheels for the iPad, don’t expect the claims about battery life to hold true. The candle that blazes the brightest is always the first to go out.

OK, let’s see what people who’ve tested it say. David Pogue:

Speaking of video: Apple asserts that the iPad runs 10 hours on a charge of its nonremovable battery — but we all know you can’t trust the manufacturer. And sure enough, in my own test, the iPad played movies continuously from 7:30 a.m. to 7:53 p.m. — more than 12 hours. That’s four times as long as a typical laptop or portable DVD player.

Walt Mossberg:

The iPad lasted 11 hours and 28 minutes, about 15% more than Apple claimed. I was able to watch four feature-length movies, four TV episodes and a video of a 90-minute corporate presentation, before the battery died midway through an episode of “The Closer.”

Why Cory Doctorow Won’t Buy an iPad (And Thinks You Shouldn’t, Either) ★

Uh, OK.

iFixit’s ‘Apple Tablet Teardown’ ★

Posited as an April Fool’s joke, this is actually a fascinating technical analysis of the Newton hardware.