When I foursquared in this morning, it was all working fine, but by the time I got to Nickerson Street Saloon for lunch, it was dead of the worst sort. PC doesn’t recognize any sort of device being plugged in. sigh.
UPDATE: I would swear I had done all the possible combinations of the two buttons available to me, for the standard 10 seconds. Then again, he said it was 15 seconds of holding down both home and power. So far, looks OK again. All things crash.
So far, using it has been a trial in annoyance. An SD card filled with movies and images is rejected as “unsupported”. I plug in my G1 phone, and it brings up 9 out or 18 images…well, place holders for them, but never the actual images. Nor did the menu controls to transfer the pictures ever show up. Unplug and re-insert, and now the apple refuses to see anything on the cameraphone. The only thing that did work was an SD card that came out of a camera, with all the regular camera directory silliness. More annoying, it looks like it only transfers a small version of the photo to the ipad, so you can’t empty out a memory card for latter uploading to iPhoto, unless your camera resolution is very small.
oh well.
The ipad/ipod auto-suggest feature doesn’t know the word barista? Wow, and neither does the firefox spell checker.
How un-hipster of them both.
So I’ve been curious about what the catch would be to AT&T’s supposedly unlimited 3G plan for the iPad. No-contract, no hassle, straightforward pricing, these are all phrases I don’t associate with AT&T. Pain, suffering, and waste…those are AT&T phrases.
Well, now that I have my 3G iPad, the truth behind their tricksy ways is becoming clear. You can’t download app updates over 20mb in size, and several apps turn off their basic functionality in the presence of 3G. Interestingly, not every app has trashed themselves in AT&T’s favor. While ABC and The Guardian are content to suck AT&T’s dick at the expense of the users that actually pay them money, Netflix stood up for their customers and supports watching over 3G. I’m curious why some apps are doing this, and some aren’t. The guardian’s ipad app claims it doesn’t support 3G out of consideration for the “user experience”, which seems like a total crock since you can just go to the regular website and download the same friggin pictures…not to mention, it’s a single static picture a day, how much bandwidth would you really have saved AT&T if I was too stupid to use a web-browser instead of an app?
I’m the kind of guy who takes such hurdles as a challenge, a challenge to find the most costly (to AT&T’s 3G network) app I can leave running all day. Congratulation to the ‘genius’ at AT&T who thought to cut costs by cutting service, you will have cost your employer more than if you just hadn’t shown up to work at all.
The ABC player doesn’t work over 3G, but the netflix movie player does.
You can’t update applications over 20mb via 3G.
more to come I’m sure.
It’s one of those, “well duuuh” moments. Turns out you can use the search-box to look thru comments, you just have to have the column displayed. You still can’t make a simple search restricted to comments, but it’s an improvement. You can’t add the lyrics tab as a column though, so still no searching thru them. This is especially a bummer because I’ve been using the larger space available in the lyrics tab, to put the full playlist for all the bilgemonkey podcasts.
I have to admit, I’m impressed with the enhance function in iPhoto, and it’s ability to recover information that seems lost.
Compare and contrast,
before
after
before
after
before
after
That snake was obsessed with me, I’m guessing the IR focus beams. Or maybe I just looked extra tasty.
My favorite recovered photo is this one of some fur
So, I’ve had the ipad for a full week of use now, and am still in love.
I have not yet worn the battery down below 45% in a single day’s usage, and that includes the first couple of days where I was either downloading new apps, or playing netflix movies, trying to use it all up.
Kindle vs iBook.app — the kindle app seems rushed. It’s got obvious flaws, like the way it’s status messages overwrite permanent screen elements, leaving neither readable while the message is up. iBook.books are in full color. Maybe some kindle books are offered in color, and I just haven’t found one yet.
WeatherBug – teh awesome!
DoodleBlast HD – still loving it. My goto show-off game when someone wants to see what the pad can do.
ComicPad vs GoodReader — The comicpad dev has been very responsive, but GoodReader supports such a wide variety of formats, most importantly pdf, such that I suspect I will likely convert any cbz/cbr I have into pdfs (thank you ImageMagick!).
GeometryWars-Touch – Keeping fingers in the control zones can be difficult, but it’s another game that makes people go “wow”.
Harbor Master HD – Fun and reasonably challenging.
Beatwave – One of the few music apps I can think of that is just as impressive with the sound turned off.
Tetris – Years ago, when tetrisDS disappeared from the market, I worried at the future of licensed tetris products. Glad to see that’s all been worked out. It is pretty. It is tetris. The controls are a bit iffy though. Many is the time I find myself banging on the screen harder and harder to get a piece to turn before it’s too late. Then it turns 12 times all at once.
I’m still not sold on the seemingly flimsy apple-branded case, but haven’t given up on it yet.
The whole iphone OS 4, no language before objective-C pronouncement doesn’t sit well with me, just because I’m a lazy programmer who likes write-once, run-everywhere frameworks. I guess it’s just more reason to learn HTML5.
One of the iPad accessories seems to be shipped directly from the factory in china. The UPS tracking shows the package starting out in china, going to alaska, then down to kentucky, with a supposed delivery date back up here in Seattle tomorrow.