"iPad" entries

Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is recording your moves

A hidden file in iOS 4 is regularly recording the position of devices.

Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan have discovered that iPhones and 3G iPads running iOS 4 are regularly recording the location of devices into a hidden file.

The magic adapter: Apple TV and the battle for the living room

Why conventional wisdom about Apple's failure to secure the living room is wrong.

The Apple TV appears to be an afterthought, but its iOS-based second generation may actually blaze Apple's trail into the connected living room.

Running up the score: Thoughts on iPad 2 announcement

Commentary: Why 2011 will be the year of iPad 2.

While it's tempting to see the battle between iOS-powered iPads and Android-powered tablets as close, Mark Sigal says the iPad 2 launch showed that Apple is blowing out the competition.

Want to succeed in online content? Get small, be open, go free

Formation Media CEO Sam Jones on how fading publishing brands can be reborn on the digital side.

Formation Media CEO Sam Jones discusses his recipe for online content success: It has to be free, it has to be widely available, and publishers must operate at a web-appropriate scale.

Four short links: 14 February 2011

Four short links: 14 February 2011

Vesting Incentives, Camera Hacks, iPad Longform Saviour?, and Bogus Science

  1. Stephen Elop is a Flight Risk (Silicon Beat) — a foresight-filled 2008 article that doesn’t make Nokia’s new CEO look good. A reminder to boards and CEOs that option vesting schedules matter. (via Hacker News)
  2. CHDK — Canon Hack Development Kit gives point-and-shoot Canon digital camera new features like RAW images, motion detection, a USB remote, full control over exposure and so on. (via Sennheiser HD 555 to HD 595 Mod)
  3. The Atavist – iPad app for original long-form nonfiction (what used to be called “journalism”). (via Tim O’Reilly)
  4. Why Most Published Findings are False (PLoS Medicine) — as explained by John D. Cook, Suppose you have 1,000 totally ineffective drugs to test. About 1 out of every 20 trials will produce a p-value of 0.05 or smaller by chance, so about 50 trials out of the 1,000 will have a “significant” result, and only those studies will publish their results. The error rate in the lab was indeed 5%, but the error rate in the literature coming out of the lab is 100 percent!.

The iPad's ripple effect

"Best iPad Apps" author Pete Meyers on how the iPad is shaping content and development.

“Best iPad Apps” author Pete Meyers examines the iPad’s impact on app development, entertainment, and content creation. Plus: He reveals three app rating patterns — C-spread, L-spread and The Claw — and what each means.

Four short links: 25 January 2011

Four short links: 25 January 2011

Scalable Scraping, iPad Tactility, Emotional Failbots, and Asking Good Questions

  1. node.io — distributed node.js-based scraper system.
  2. Joystick-It — adhesive joystick for the iPad. Compare the Fling analogue joystick. Tactile accessories for the iPad—hot new product category or futile attempt to make a stripped-down demi-computer into an aftermarked pimped-out hackomatic? (via Aza Raskin on Twitter)
  3. Programmed for Love (Chronicle of Higher Education) — Sherry Turkle sees the danger in social hardware emulating emotion. Companies will soon sell robots designed to baby-sit children, replace workers in nursing homes, and serve as companions for people with disabilities. All of which to Turkle is demeaning, “transgressive,” and damaging to our collective sense of humanity. It’s not that she’s against robots as helpers—building cars, vacuuming floors, and helping to bathe the sick are one thing. She’s concerned about robots that want to be buddies, implicitly promising an emotional connection they can never deliver. (via BoingBoing)
  4. Asking the Right Questions (Expert Labs) — Andy Baio compiled a list of how Q&A sites like StackOverflow, Quora, Yahoo! Answers, etc. steer people towards asking questions whose answers will improve the site (and away from flamage, chitchat, etc.). The secret sauce to social software is the invisible walls that steer people towards productive behaviour.
Four short links: 22 December 2010

Four short links: 22 December 2010

Etherpad, Scala, Journalism, and Mazes from Ruby

  1. ietherpad — continuation of the etherpad startup. Offers pro accounts, and promise an iPad app to come. (via Steve O’Grady on Twitter)
  2. Scala Collections Quickref — quick reference card for the Scala collections classes. (via Ian Kallen on Twitter)
  3. Raw Data and the Rise of Little BrotherTurns out, despite the great push for citizen journalism, citizens are not, on average, great at “journalism.” But they are excellent conduits for raw material — those documents, videos, or photos.
  4. Theseus 1.0 — impressive source maze builder in Ruby contributed to the public domain. (via Hacker News)

Anatomy of an ebook app

Lessons learned while building a top 20 ebook for the iPad.

"Rabbit and Turtle's Amazing Race" was featured by Apple (leading to a 3-5X bost in paid downloads) and for a time became one of the top grossing App Store ebooks. Mark Sigal discusses the lessons he learned while developing and marketing the title.

Four short links: 29 October 2010

Four short links: 29 October 2010

Tablet Magazines, Ubiquitous Urban Computing, Families and Work, and Twitter Query Language

  1. My iPad Magazine Stand (Khoi Vinh) — My opinion about iPad-based magazines is that they run counter to how people use tablets today and, unless something changes, will remain at odds with the way people will use tablets as the medium matures. They’re bloated, user-unfriendly and map to a tired pattern of mass media brands trying vainly to establish beachheads on new platforms without really understanding the platforms at all. (via Shawn Connally)
  2. Dan Hill Keynote (video) — beautiful and thought-provoking presentation on mining, using, and presenting data in the urban environment.
  3. The Dark Side of Entrepreneurship Continued (Pete Warden) — “work/life balance” is so trite, but I’ve been fascinated by how people deal with it since I heard Joe Kraus talk at Web 2.0 about what he was doing different at his latest startup. He replied that he was working fewer hours because he had a family, and that it was a difficult line to walk but he felt that he was managing it better because it was his second time around.
  4. TweeQL — query language for tweets. Query languages encode use scenarios. They limit what can be done easily but those limits also permit optimizations. I note the arrival of new query languages (cf Yahoo! Pipes) for these reasons. (via raffi on Twitter)