Tag: ipad

RPGs as Data Driven Apps

April 15, 2011 / / 0 Comments

I meant to work on this post earlier this week but my week got real busy and I lost my time to write up posts.

I spent some time thinking about how pen-and-paper RPGs are best represented in an electronic medium. I don’t mean writing a full game like Neverwinter Nights; I mean representing the actual experience of the books, rules and dice in an app format. I realized that RPGs are by their very nature data driven: the character sheet, the rule set, the world setting, and the information that goes with it. Because everything is created whole-cloth — even those settings based on established properties — the game must be communicated with information for it to go. This is different than a card game or a board game which require a very small amount of fixed information (what’s on a card, say, or a die roll moves you 5 spaces, or you need to play this token) and a large set of rules. An RPG requires a large amount of information and an arguable amount of rules.

The devil is in the details with the amount and control of the information surrounding an RPG. This lies at the heart of many rules and design-based conflicts: how much information is needed for a person to interact with the world, how is the information manipulated to model the world, and how is this information communicated and stored. In the past, games often required a HIGH amount of information to interact with a HIGH number of system rules to determine a HIGHLY DETAILED piece of data after running the system — a simulationist system. Today, we have a huge number of styles from a low data with small ruleset games (like Fiasco) to moderate sized amount of data/character and data/world with moderate sized rule sets (like FATE or Cortex) to high information games with high detail (like D&D4).

This is all run on data. The nice thing about data is that data is about all a computer understands. It can hold data, process rulesets on data, and present data-driven results at the end of processing. So for example we have a large piece of data model in a character sheet. A character sheet possess stats in some form (d8 Wits, 18 Strength, 3 dots in Hawt, etc). The world may also possess similar unified stats — an NPC, a known test, a quantified piece of the world. Passing the world stats and the character stats through a known resolution engine generates a known result, which may also be stored and used to modify other data.

This is all basic game writing 101 and absolutely nothing new, but it’s important to lay out the basics before figuring out how to make it go. A character sheet is simply a line from a data model that has a paper-based persistence model representing a shared contract between player and game world. What becomes more interesting is in building up databases of world information. Pulling up, for example, cult information for Trail of Cthulhu with lists of cults (pick one) and integrated NPC and evil book lists, perhaps be able to cross-reference this with information either found online (automatically populate a database with reference information that auto-loads inline) and information in published material. Work against perhaps web services of a master repository that hosts a bigger centralized database and… but this is starting to get off the device and into web servers and databases and LAMP stacks and generally wandering off the reservation. But this is the idea — RPGs are data driven applications and more data makes them better.

This is where my mind is starting to go for RPG-based apps. There’s more to it than that, though:

* Core Data for storage, persistence, data modelling and all the CRUD facilities (create, read, update, delete).
* Cocos2D engine for dice rolling, card playing, and visual representations of game mechanics.
* WebKit for integrating web resources and maybe a shared repository
* Quartz for drawing really nice character sheets, game sheets, NPC sheets, and to generate PDFs on the fly.
* UIKit with Cocos2D for front end data management screens.
* Network stack for cross-communication between devices, communication with back end web services.

I think it would be nice to be able to have a database of NPCs whose sheets render nicely on the screen and then with a click be able to summon up world information around the NPC — their horrible organization, say, or, GOD FORBID, a RELATIONSHIP MAP… Computers are really good at knitting all this data together into a palm of the hand player, GM and gaming community set of tools. It’s what they do.

These are where my thoughts are sort of going for apps, but I also have lots of thought about an iFiasco app too which hasn’t been fleshed out yet.

And Man… iPad based Smallville Relationship Maps with integrated character sheets. Just…. damn. Can it be done? OF COURSE.

iPad Game Programming

April 11, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Friday I had a spirited conversation about what sort of widgets and toys I need to really make game-based iPad apps. I came up with a list that looked like:

  • Handle Playing Cards (backs, fronts, turn, flip over, etc.)
  • Handle Game Tokens (rotate, pass around with a gesture, etc)
  • Handle Dice (roll dice, move dice around, support pools)
  • Handle Game Play Surface (game boards, playing surface)

I sort of skuttled around the Internet for a while and found Cocos2D. I downloaded it, installed the Xcode 4 templates, built the library, and worked through the first two tutorials (of about 20). I have to say, other than my brain tried to fold itself into unnatural corners of space time trying to remember basic geometry* from High School — which I just blanked on — I was stunningly impressed with the library. If you’re following along with what I am doing, I encourage you to go look at the library and start thinking about the possibilities. Will it work for rendering screens for card games and board games and dice based games? As soon as I figure out how to get dice to roll without having to use Cocos3D (although I may have to) then yes, I can build up a library for making interactive games on the iPad.

Current plan is with my new knowledge of Cocoa Programming and the way it handles stuff is to expand into mastery of Cocos2D, persistence libraries (for saving game state), networking, and some Core Data for something I’ll talk about at length tomorrow — I had some deep thoughts over the weekend for how a certain kind of app should work and I’ll delve into it.

Meanwhile, as sort of a joke, I was trying to come up with a name for an LLC since these apps need a name of a company. In my throbbing brainmeats, the current forerunner is Naked Llama Games, LLC after my friend the poor, shaved llama who gave up its downy undercoat to be blended with cotton to make a sublime wool for those who really want to make very expensive hats. Sadly, my copy of Adobe Illustrator is insisting my license is no good despite having the CDs and the license, so for a logo I will have to use Inkscape. Not that there’s a single thing wrong with Inkscape.


* I am going to need to pick up some sort of geometry refresher. Perhaps wikipedia can help me out here.

A required iPad app

October 17, 2010 / / 1 Comment

A quick interlude:

If you have an iPad, you will want to go to the store and download the new, free TED talk app. It’s an interface to the TED website ( www.ted.com ) but much more comfortable to view. TED talks are about really cool things given by really cool people. Want to learn something cool about science or tech or art in 20 minutes? Watch a TED talk.

My only complaint is the lack of a good search engine to find talks. Hopefully they’ll take feedback – it’s a common complaint – and get one into the app soon.

It shows off your iPad and it’s free. If you have an iPad, you should have the TED app.

Awesome Guitar Software is Awesome

July 30, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I have two — two! — pieces of awesome software to showcase today for the iPad. Perhaps you thought the iPad was only good for watching Netflix streaming but now it is made of rock.

TabToolKit by Agile Partners

At first blush you may be all “buh?” But let me tell you the greatness of TabToolKit.

If you’ve played guitar for years… and years… and years… and years… you occasionally open up an old book or an old bag and there, lurking within, is a badly scratched out downloaded from an ASCII document from some repository tab of some guitar song or other you really wanted to learn but all you had was this tab that sort of told you where to put your fingers and not a hell of alot else. You struggled for a while and then gave up. TabToolKit:

1. Organizes your tabs. If anything else, it means no more printing them out, folding them up, or ripping them while trying to play awkwardly on the couch.
2. Displays them in a neat and easy way for practice — especially on an iPad with an easel stand.
3. Uses Guitar Pro tabs which have all the parts to a song, the sheet music, and the tabs so the music-saavy can actually look at notes and go “oh, that is way less difficult than I thought.”
4. Has metronomes, speed up, slow down, looping and repeat features for working on a particular practice.
5. Count in and play at any point in the song.
6. Drop voices in and out.
7. For those wondering how to play said power chords, it highlights where to hold the strings down on the fretboard.
8. And Guitar Pro tabs are extremely plentiful for free.

I love this piece of software. I absolutely love it. I recommend TabToolKit to anyone with a guitar — a beginner, someone looking to improve, someone wanting to carry their collection of tabs around conveniently, anyone. It is squee in a can. It’s iPhone/iPod/iPad — the iPad version is a native, full screen version.

Amplitube for iPad by IK Multimedia

I love the original Amplitube but getting my guitar jacked into my Macbook Pro was always a huge hassle — converter boxes that never worked, feedback noise, weird issues. I ended up with an actual guitar-to-usb cable that lost sound and had high latency but at least worked. Despite this, Amplitube is such a marvelous piece of software it justifies buying a Mac (a Windows version is now available) to complement one’s electric guitar. Who wouldn’t go through the trouble for all those stompboxes, amps and cabs in one place to model any sound, anywhere?

Now I have Amplitube for iPad. Sure it has far fewer stompboxes, amps and cabs then the big software load but what it has is more than enough to model up any sound for any purpose.

1. The iRig dongle works out of the packaging without any software or configuration. Plug guitar into iRig. Plug headphones into iRig. Plug iRig into iPad. Done.

2. Amplitube for iPad (iPhone, iPod) works right out of the box and comes with 12 presets, 11 stomps, 5 amps and 5 cabs for the full ($20) install of the software. The stomps and amps all have little knobs that turn by running a finger along the screen for custom settings. Settings can be saved.

3. The modeling sounds excellent. The latency is low. The feedback is non-existent.

4. Everything sounds better with the Delay pedal which does lock to a BPM. You, too, can sound like a bad Yes knock-off!

I have not played with pulling in my own track and putting effects over it on the fly but this is a supported feature.

It’s just full of squee. Instead of carrying around a Mac and a whole toolbox full of chords and gizmos to get it to work and then not able to get it out to a speaker or an amp all I need is my regular guitar cable, the iRig, headphones and/or output device and the iPad. It sounds fantastic.

For someone who just wants to sit and pick up a guitar and play, and have the guitar sound good through the headphones, this is a must-have. The iRig is $40. The software is either free (Amplitube FREE) with the option to add to it, or $20 for the full build. Everything, yes, is $80 but $80 is the cost of a single, good stompbox*.

So see? The iPad does do things other than just stream videos.

The alternative I recommend for the same price is TabToolKit and a Line6 PocketPOD, but the Amplitube has the visceral feeling of messing with gear where the PocketPOD is dialing to a setting. Not that I don’t love the POD, but I am more likely to have the iPad on me than the PocketPOD.

iPad Apps

June 22, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I’m having some mild bandwidth problems lately and I was disappointed with the lack of a good WordPress app on the iPad so posting has gotten mildly sporadic. I swapped out my netbook for my iPad as my “go to” travel computer and, after having used it for a while, came up with a list of apps with high value. I am hoping to find something decent for blog posting but nothing has come up yet.

Stuff I have given high marks to so far and are worth buying:

Amazon’s Kindle Reader: I found I cannot stand Apple’s iBook’s application but I can read from Amazon’s Kindle Reader for hours without eyestrain or issue. Also, it syncs up with my Kindle seamlessly, grabs me books from our eBook archive, and looks very nice on the screen. It must be the iBooks choice of font because I don’t use it. Amazon Kindle Reader for the win.

Reeder: A beautiful RSS reader that integrates seamlessly with Google Reader. It makes reading feeds feel natural and has clean integration with services like Instapaper, ReadItLater, etc.

myTexts: A clean full-screen editor that turns the iPad into a distraction-free writing work surface. Works beautifully with a bluetooth keyboard. It performs all the saving and backing up of documents automatically, has several syncing/exporting options to get text off the iPad. Integrates with myTexts for MacOSX.

Good Reader: PDF reader that gets better with every update. Beautiful presentation of PDFs on the screen with easy navigation options. It looks beautiful with full color PDFs and the text is easy to read. It makes purchasing gaming PDFs seem like a good idea.*

DropBox: Easy access to cloud storage. Integrates with several apps, including Good Reader, for file display. Makes it trivial to carry around a huge number of PDF books and call them up at will, WiFi Gods willing.

TabToolKit: The reason I wanted an iPad — the app that sold it to me. (You can look at it here.) It plays fully voiced Guitar Pro tabs — thousands and thousands can be found complete and of decent quality online. For learning songs on the guitar, it’s fantastic. It is not quite as good for piano because it only shows one hand at a time — if it could multi-track, it would be the perfect piece of software.

Plants vs. Zombies: No one gets their life back until the game is defeated.

Wikipanion: It makes Wikipedia feel like a Real Boy. In landscape mode, it integrates table of contents, links, and inline media beautifully. Want to learn about the Han Dynasty? Portugal? It feels like reading from a book and it’s comfortable.

Instapaper: Instapaper alone is magic. Instapaper long-formatted on the iPad with no ads for clean reading makes long articles on the web worth it.

Carcassone: Yes, this is only the iPhone version of this application but it scales nicely. It has local LAN iPad support. It has internet iPad support. It’s Carcassone!

There’s other stuff, of course: my addiction to Puzzle Quest, Battle of Wesnoth, Youtube, etc. But these are the apps that have, so far, really stood out with usability and utility.

Update: I use the word “beautiful” way too many times in this post and I apologize for way lazy writing. But they do look nice on the screen when it isn’t all smudged up with fingerprints.

* I have a hard time reading PDFs off normal computer screens.

The End of Innovation?

April 8, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I freely admit this post is a “Someone is WRONG on the INTERNET” reaction but it has gotten under my skin as the meme jumped from blog posts to podcasts and yesterday, I briefly saw it mentioned on a website of actual yea olde Main Stream Media.

The meme, started on the original Cory Doctorow post on Boing Boing and then passed around by hand through word of mouth, states the iPad hails the “end of innovation.” Perhaps because my job is spending hours trying to see the forest for the trees, I look at components and devices and say, “How is this leveraged? How is this used? How can I employ this in a creative and interesting way to get maximum value?”

Some devices have one use. I don’t complain about the walled garden of the firewall or the intrusion prevention system. Some have many uses, like my Droid. Some are in between. One uses the tool for the job.

Holding the iPad in my hands, I asked these questions and all I see is the beginning. I know the interface is new and the whole cosmos of interface software and cloud-based storage will take 9 months to a year to appear and show people this new “thing” is more than a dumb xterm for streaming Netflix like from the years of the VAX. A year from now this question will be silly and forgotten. Today it’s the hot hot hot meme.

My thought process works through the device like this — and I like me bullet point lovin’:

* Before last week, a tablet was a $2000 device that required tethering to the host computer and was used for special purpose computing in drafting and art. Microsoft had tablets and *tablet software for years but they never bothered to bring it to market. Suddenly, we have a brand new market, and with a new market comes new competitors, new market pressures, and with new market pressures comes the pressure to fix issues, improve systems, and make things work. Look! Free Market! Capitalism! Innovation! This is what we, in the US, do best!

HP is throwing the gauntlet with HP Slate, which runs Windows 7 and the Notion Adam Ink will have the unbelievably slick Pixel Qi interface. But Apple got there first and has a head start…

* The nub of the argument revolves around the Apple Store. I find I do not have a core issue with a final auditing process on software before releasing it to the world.  Is it a horrible and terrible thing that an audit process is in place to keep software that crashes devices or is full of malware or turns your nice little device into a zombie host? I understand the world is not as seeped** in security as I am, but I see this as more a double prong:

1. It is a basic security check on software before it goes to market.
2. It forces developers to do the boring parts of a project and not just the exciting and interesting parts to make a completed application.

No one complains that XBox Live is a walled garden. Or the Wii App store. Or, hell, Best Buy. If you want to experiment with software and systems, new laptops are cheap and Ubuntu is a damn fine OS for that purpose. Yes, okay, perhaps it will take up to 6 weeks for your software to come to market via the Apple Store but this is a new pressure and a new set of regulations. You cannot simply release broken software and patch, patch, patch. (I am talking to you, OSS.) I for one am sick of the endless beta cycle.

* Another complaint is that one cannot write code on the iPad. First off, I doubt this will be true forever and I see an interesting market in a combination IDE and drag-and-drop construction kits to build new, cool things organically and on the fly like LEGOs. Second, no one is stopping you from joining Apple Developer Connection, downloading the toolkits and going to town on your own MacBook Pro or wherever you write code. What, someone cut your fingers off? They give you the SDK. They give you the developer guide. They give you podcasts. They give you sample code. They give you Human-Computer Interface*** guides. Youtube is full of lectures from Universities that give you an introduction. How much more do you want? Steve Jobs to come to your house?

Yeah, okay, you cannot write code right on the device (yet) but I cannot write code write on my washer, either, but code still runs in there in an embedded chip.

Of course, if you have an objection to Objective C, I’m right there with you. That’s a different argument for a different day.

* I heard, “You cannot make music on it! The MacBook Pro came with Garageband and now they don’t give me that and I am just a passive listener! I will never discover my magnificence as a composer!****” Really? Have you never heard of Google? I hear it’s on computers now. Can you not type “music software ipad” into it? Perhaps you can use that browser that comes on the iPad.

Less sarcastic: Anyone who has ever sat down to a DAW knows the mouse and keyboard are completely inadequate to the job. DAWs like Logic Pro or Pro-Tools require a small galaxy of tactile peripherals to hook to the computer to get it to work satisfactorily. Eric bought me Synthtopia’s MiniSynth Pro which, although being largely monophonic, was a joy to use. Yes, I don’t feel the ridges of the control surface under my fingertips but music production is a tactile art and it felt far more natural to push on buttons and push sliders with my fingers than clicking and dragging with a mouse. If anything is going to explode with the iPad, it’s this — electronic digital music production, DJing, mashups, and new music.

No, you cannot record live to it (yet). Nor can you hook a control surface to it (yet). I wouldn’t want to do any mastering on it and these applications desperately need access to cloud storage. But if anything is going to explode, it’s right here because it’s comfortable, easy to carry, and multi-touch for full five-finger action. When Propellerheads has something out for it, I will need to be alone by myself with it for a little while to cry.

* “I can’t draw on it! I can’t write my novel on it!” Considering tablets were designed and created as artist control surfaces to computers for a more natural interface, I won’t even go there because the stupid, it burns. Suffice to say, I hear Brushes for the iPad has gotten incredible reviews.

As for writing your novel, I do suggest a cheap netbook and dropbox. Or a bluetooth keyboard and the iPad dock and dropbox. Either/or.

* “I can’t open it and see what is inside! I can’t do my own hardware mods/maintenance!” I know I am a terrible engineer but I see this as a feature. I like building and modding machines, too. But I don’t want to foist my modded machine on millions and millions of people. Is it terrible to get a system into hands of those who are perhaps not a member of the Computer Priesthood who don’t want to or have to worry about upgrading their video cards and drivers? I mean, I don’t know about you but I love my Xbox360 and I don’t crack that sucker open… and no one says you cannot build your own tablet out of components. We need to learn and accept that bug reports, crash reports, and random failure due to hardware incompatibility is not an option any more, people do not want to support their own hardware, and move on from that point.

This is making me deeply crazy. The iPad is a peripheral device to your main MacBook Pro. It’s a surface. Surfaces have been around for a decade and all computing has not stopped yet! I do not think anyone is going to be doing any music mastering or live editing of full motion pictures or doing full animation or controlling supercomputing***** on it quite yet. On the other hand, DJ software using fingers to organically mix and scratch pieces together to build a track? Awesome. Unbelievably awesome. And the price is right.

The iPad has some features I am not thrilled with. I cannot read books off it because it makes my laser-eyes bleed. I tried and went back to the Kindle. Some of the software is rough around the edges. The integrated cloud storage it desperately needs isn’t there yet. I don’t like the smeary fingerprints. It is just a tad too heavy. But the end of innovation? Turning computers into completely passive devices and you into a passive drone? Don’t you have a TV for that? For people who claim to love science fiction and see the future, the minds seem pretty damn closed.

I have ranted. I am done now. Maybe.

* Fantastic tablet software, actually. If the HP Slate works, things will get interesting, fast. But Microsoft hasn’t been able to ship anything good in years save the Xbox360.
** Or as fascinated with. I need to go get help for my addiction to all things botnet.
*** This is the rub, right here. No more writing terrible interfaces. That’s where the innovation apparently ends — you have to buck up and put on big boy pants and produce code people want to use and can work with in a natural way. And In the End, the Command Line.
**** This one got under my skin because it was a comment made on the Slate Cultural Gabfest and I almost threw my Droid out the window. Except I love my Droid.

***** If you don’t think I’m not thinking about cheap surfaces and controlling huge distributed computations across clusters then you are crazy because I have had that thought.

Ars Technica reviews the iPad

April 7, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I meant to talk about where I think we’ve been and where I think technology is going and where the innovation really is but I got hammered today so it has to wait until this evening.  But meanwhile, I give you the extremely (and great) in-depth review of the iPad from Ars Technica:

The iPad isn’t a big iPod touch—an iPod touch is a miniature iPad that restricts the full multitouch experience in exchange for offering greater portability. With the iPad, in contrast, you get multitouch the way it was meant to be done.

via Ars Technica reviews the iPad.

ComiXology

April 7, 2010 / / 0 Comments

The big question I have gotten all day is:

“How are comics on the iPad?”

It’s no big secret that I am a comics nerd. I do prefer my comics to be indie but comics are comics and I will go read X-Men or Justice Leage with the best of them. Knowing comics on demand were on the iPad, I was chomping at the bit to check it out. At first I thought only the Marvel app was available which delivers only Marvel comics, but there’s an app called comiXology, which the Marvel app is built on, which delivers indies and creator-owned and small-house and Dark Horse and Image and a fair number of Manga publishers if you’re into Manga. I’m not, but to each his or her own and you can read Manga off the iPad.

Tonight I have read issues of Walking Dead (excellent), Action Philosophers (interesting) and Mark Millar’s Wanted (excellent). The bastards give away the first issue for free and then dangle the rest of the series for pay.

Dear god, I need to delete my iTunes account because I am so doomed.

Okay, so. First off: search and sort by writer, publisher, genre, title. I cannot find any Grant Morrison (hmm) but I can find some Bendis on the two apps. That’s good. Several excellent series are available in their totality.

Second: reading comics on the iPad is a religious experience. The screens are crisp and bright and easy to read. The colors are deep and true. You can click to zoom in on the panels. Reading feels comfortable and natural. It is a flick of the finger to change the page. You can buy issues or entire graphic novel collections.

Third: Buying means clicking on the big happy BUY NOW button. It charges my credit card and downloads the file and puts it in an on-iPad library. Older comics are $0.99, newer are $1.99 and most collections are $9.99. They’re cheaper than the print versions.

I hope someone sends in a rescue team because I might call in tomorrow with ebola. Also, only partial libraries are available so far but this will get better, fast. Pretty soon huge runs of comic series will be available to click, download, and read on demand in bright, easy to read color.

I give comics on the iPad two thumbs and a toe up.

On the iPad

April 6, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I wanted to buy an iPad for Eric’s birthday but he had a high water mark: if Papers, essentially iTunes for research paper and article management, came out with an iPad reader application, Eric would want an iPad (very badly). He has the iPod client and while it works, it is difficult to read papers on an iPod Touch. The screen real estate isn’t there.

Papers came out with a rather nice native iPad reader that syncs with the master Papers application running on Eric’s MacBook Pro. He knew I was taking in my precious MacBook Pro for service — the i key, of all things, died on the keyboard and it turned out to be challenging to type without an i — and if I happened to walk out of the Apple store with one he would not be upset. I asked the guy at the counter if they had any in stock and they had 15 left, so I sucked the cost and took one of them.

Having used one now, I have a bunch of thoughts on it in completely random order:

* If you believe the iPad is the “end of innovation” your mental box is very small indeed. The iPad is disruptive technology. It’s something that fits between laptops and smartphones. We don’t know where it will go (yet). But us in the tech world should be used to this sort of thing by now. The Internet was a disruptive technology. Refridgerators! Telephones! Off-set Printing! They happen.* The world moves on.

* Today, the iPad is a big iPod. This is undeniably true. I will never sell anyone different. Most of the available software is iPod software running in large screen mode**. However, the software coming out natively for the iPad show tantalizing glimpses of the future. The iPod can convey information, play music, and do many excellent PDA things but it does not have a the real estate for comfortable comics, movies, or PDFs.*** The native iPad apps are amazing.

* Katie already has an iPod Touch she adores. At first she complained the iPad was too heavy. Once she got her hands on Peggle she was ready to go. As a device for children, it’s magnificent. It’s hard to say how magnificent it is until you put one in your own child’s hands. Add that with the Kindle app downloading full-color children’s books for easy and comfortable reading and you start to see the future.

* Eric’s Papers reader and the Goodreader PDF reader blew me away with how crisp, clear, and readable the PDFs are. I could not read off an iPad for hours and hours like I can a Kindle but I can manage a PDF. We won’t talk about the comic books apps because I’m in danger of bankrupting us all.

* For scientific research, the iPad is a godsend. Being able to get papers, Omnigraffle, quick sketch, quick note-taking, it is the perfect in-hand device for making quick notes and then syncing them back to the MacBook in the office. It fits comfortable in a hand or on a bench without the clunkiness of the clamshell case of a laptop or the space of an actual computer.

* We showed it to my Mom and she was amazed. The first impulse was getting one for my Grandmother. The 3G version will give her what she doesn’t have now: easy email, an easy way to carry thousands of pictures, an easy way to get to streaming movies. She would never need cords, a router, or have to ever put discs in it or worry about maintaining her hardware. All she needs is a $30/month subsidized no-contract 3G wireless and 16G iPad and it’s a computer my Grandmother can use.

* Eric and Katie have already played two-player checkers while using the iPad as a portable board between the two of them. Having a portable card/board game device is awesome. It’s hard to play board games on the iPod — Eric and I played Catan on his iPod and it was difficult to see the board — but imagine being able to turn and place Carcassone tiles with your fingers. The board games are exciting! They are!

* My impulses for the device usage are completely different from Eric’s or Katie’s or my Mom’s. This is what opens my eyes: we all have this one device and see different things. I see a platform where I can load synthesizers on it and make music easily without having to bring up a whole rig — and a few are already available. I cannot get a full portable keyboard with an iPod, but a multi-touch iPad is a much different story. Katie sees movies and games. Eric sees PDF and information management. My parents want the netflix streaming.

To sum up:

I did not expect to be as blown away by the device as I am. I was somewhat iffy on it when it came out and didn’t expect to want one or need one. After all, my iPod is a 3rd Generation iPod with an 80G hard drive and a clickwheel. I hold the iPad in my hands and it is not my netbook and it is not my MacBook Pro. It is a device I can hold comfortably in my hand and read comics, or make music, or play games without ever having to worry about having to be the system administrator. It’s something else completely different. It’s a powerful concept.

And yeah, sure, we’ve been trying to do tablets for 10 years and they’ve always failed, but isn’t it neat when someone actually gets it right?

Disclaimer: Yes, I am a Mac cultist, but I use an Ubuntu phone and an Ubuntu 9.10 netbook. I dislike Windows on the computer but you will take the Xbox360 from my cold dead hands. I like things that work more than loyalty to a company or a brand. Apple makes things that work. So does Google. If Microsoft wants to play, then perhaps they should make things that work because blue screens are no longer an option.

* Puzzle Quest!
** I will talk more about what industries I see growing out of the iPad tomororow. I have some serious thoughts on this topic but I am still digesting.
*** As a proud owner of a Droid — which I love — I know there are apps that run tiny and great and apps that need room to breathe. Human Interface design is important, folks!

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