News from Great Castle Wilson

For those who don’t know what they are, here is what the iPad Camera Connection Kit looks like:

(Image is on Apple website; if it gets moved, follow the link above to see them.)

It’s basically just two plastic doingles with iPod connectors on one side and a USB port and SD card slot (respectively) on the other. Not exciting, and presumably not particularly difficult to make.

So, why is it that still, months after the iPad was released, these things are basically impossible to find? I just polled the Rideau Apple Store, Carbon Computing and Best Buy/Future Shop. Result: Nada — and several places indicated that there was a waiting list when they did show up. Even the online Apple Store is saying 4..6 weeks delivery. WTF?

Maybe Apple misjudged the popularity of this add on initially, but surely in the first few days it must have become obvious that nearly every person who has an iPad wants one.

I’m too sane — now, be nice — to believe that there is some kind of conspiracy here, but maybe Apple just doesn’t want us to have these, for some reason. In any case, I’m tired of waiting, so if anybody sees aftermarket versions out there, please let me know.

MacFixit has a nice little workflow for simplifying the task of getting a document onto your iPad for offline reading. It’s not surprising what’s going on — you just create a PDF and then copy it to iTunes to make it available in iBooks — but did you know it was trivial to add a “Save PDF to iTunes” menu item in the standard print dialog?

Easily save Web pages, documents in iTunes for use with iOS devices

As I’m sure everyone knows by now, Apple finally announced the new iPhone yesterday. There are much better sources than here for all the details so, just for grins, I’ll point you at Gizmodo’s summary.

Some of the more interesting points:

• The processor has been bumped up to be the same as the one in the iPad. That’s good, because it will help with sluggish web page loading, but also because the display has been increased in resolution to the point where it needs the horsepower just to paint it.
• Speaking of the display, the resolution is now 960×640 which gives it >300 dpi resolution. To keep that in perspective, that’s better than a cheap laser printer. I’m not sure how they have pulled off changing the dpi without effecting the way applications look, but the claim is they’ve got it to work. Let’s hope it’s not the “2x” mode from the iPad.
• Really for me, the best new feature is an improved camera. I actually use the camera on my 3GS, but it’s absolutely terrible in low light conditions. The new one is supposed to be better resolution, better low light behavior, and it has an LED flash. I guess we’ll see. Any of the example pictures I’ve seen so far still seem to have a fair amount of noise in them.
• They’ve also added another camera on the front of the display, for doing video conferencing. There’s an app called “Facetime” (ugh.) to support iPhone-to-iPhone calling, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why they didn’t just put iChat on it. If I could video conference with Deb on her Mac, I could actually imagine using it. Also, currently at least, it only supports calling over wifi. boo.

The device will, of course, be running the new version of the iPhone OS, which has been renamed “iOS”. I suspect this was in keeping with the rumours of the new Apple TV box, which is purported to be running this OS. They probably have dreams of running it on other devices that don’t look anything like phones.

The good news about iOS 4 is that will be a free upgrade for any iPhone/iPod that can run it, and should be available June 21. The bad news is that won’t be available for the iPad until “this fall”.

I’m sure no one is surprised that I did, indeed, go and pick up an iPad the first day that they were available in Ottawa. As I had been telling people, I didn’t pre-order one, since I wanted to use one first, to make sure that it was going to work well for my most important usecase (i.e. eBook reading) before I leapt onto the bandwagon.

So, Friday morning, I went down to Carbon Computing and spent some time playing with the ones they had on display.

[Aside: The iPad release to retail in Canada was odd. I have no inside information about this, but it's pretty clear that the only outlet that was allowed to say they would have stock on the first day was the Apple Store. As a result, there were hundreds of people waiting in line when the Rideau Apple Store opened that morning, which is I guess the effect they were going for. By contrast, I just walked into Carbon Computing, wandered over to the display machines, played with one for a while, and then said "I'd like the 32Gig, non-3G model" — in and out in about 20 minutes. Having been in the line when the Rideau store opened a few months back, I can tell you that this was a much more pleasant experience.]

In any case, the iPad does make a perfectly acceptable e-reader. It does not have as high a pixel density as the Kindle, and the glossy screen might get tiring in some lighting conditions, but overall it’s excellent. The screen is bright, and the colors pop.

One clear win over the Kindle et al. is the availability of multiple book stores. Although Apple’s iBooks store currently only has the public domain books from Gutenberg Press in Canada, you can also get all of the books available for the Kindle, and all those for Kobo. This feature alone seems like it will doom the dedicated readers.

As of writing this, there are no iPad versions of the eReader or Stanza apps. I can tell you that using the iPod versions in “2x” mode is simply not a viable way to read, so hopefully they will come out with updates. Unfortunately, it may just be that these “old school” readers will fade away in the face of the new players. This would be a shame, in both cases; I have a lot of eReader content that I’d like to be able to re-read on the iPad, and Stanza has been also very useful for reading my current ePub formatted content.

Anyway, this is also the traditional “post done on the new device”. I used the Wordpress app [Warning: iTunes link], which runs on both iPod and iPad. It’s an excellent way to manage your blog on either device, but the iPad layout is significantly better for entering new content.