qwzybug

It's really very well done. Lots of obvious spots where it's 1.0 (can't select text, lots of ads for iPhone apps that don't link to the store [fail!], some interactions are nonobvious or a little clunky), but the experience is fantastic.

Unlike most Flash websites, the tablet Wired is generally a genuine improvement over dead-tree, merging the interactivity of the web site with the design and browsability of the magazine with the UX capabilities of the iPad. Really, it's an accomplishment.

Too bad most of Wired's content is so resoundingly meh...

Edit: It's worth noting that 99% of the iPad magazine apps are roughly comparable to Flash websites: gain a little glitz, lose a lot of usability. The Wired magazine is the first one I've felt really nails it.

Lots of tourers stick a paper map up there. If it's the 3G iPad following your location with the Little Blue Dot™, you could glance down to see upcoming streets/turns/merges. But yeah, for God's sake don't multitask on a motorcycle.

The "fruit salad" visualization is beautiful.

I like monkey patching NilClass to STFU. Bonus: the code fits in a tweet! http://mobile.twitter.com/qwzybug/status/9033799293

Message-eating nils are one of my favorite features of Objective-C.

TFA notes that the iPad seems to be cannibalizing iPod sales rather than Macs, though certainly there's no way to know for sure.

It's amazing how quickly you can single out people using supposedly anonymized datasets like this. There's a CMU paper noting that 87% of Americans are uniquely identified by their birthdate, 5-digit zip code, and gender: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/09/your-secrets...

Statistics are neat.

My buddy Justin wrote this last night: simple menubarlet to redirect facebook.com requests to a local webserver when you want. Using this and a sensible privacy setting ought to make Facebook much more amenable to privacy types.

Gödel's theorem in particular lends itself to this sort of thing. For more mathematical schadenfreude, I like Franzen's "An Incomplete Guide to its Use and Abuse" http://www.amazon.com/Godels-Theorem-Incomplete-Guide-Abuse/...

Hackers will be interested especially in the rather weak attempts to use Gödel to make all sorts of silly inferences about artificial intelligence and the nature of mind.

Probably no scientific result of the 20th centry, except maybe the theory of relativity, has been used by so many to prove so much while understanding so little.

If you're into this sort of thing, I highly, highly recommend M. G. J. Minnaert's Light and Color in the Outdoors: http://www.amazon.com/Light-Color-Outdoors/dp/0387979352

The harvest moon is one of his favorite illusions, and there just tons of little nuggets like this. It reads like an optical Wittgenstein: a series of short, numbered observations about the way light and vision work that you'd never have thought of, but once you read, you can't stop noticing.

E.g.: you can always predict exactly where a rainbow will be, you can tell leaded glass at a glance, wire meshes only cast vertical shadows, the green flash is very real, sunsets look exactly like sunrises, you can navigate by a polarized lens, hills look steeper from above for the same reason that steeples look shorter than the shadows they cast on a cloud (related to the harvest moon), and the line of the sun on the ocean always points right to you. Have you ever noticed atmospheric perspective, or how drastically colors change with distance? You will after reading this book.

Minnaert makes some interesting claims about the harvest moon in particular. For example, lie on your back and look at the sky for a while: the flattened dome effect tends to wash out rather quickly, and the moon looks roughly the same size in any direction. He also claims that binocular vision is closely related to the perceptual flattening of the celestial dome, and one-eyed people do not perceive the harvest moon. I'm not sure if he's totally correct, but it's interesting to think about, isn't it?

It changed the way I look at the world. I believe scientific consensus has moved on in certain areas in the years since it was originally composed, but Minnaert's careful thought has aged superbly. Definitely worth it.

Try shaving oil. It's fantastic, and a 1.5 oz. bottle is enough for near 100 shaves.

Alternatively, a bar of shaving soap and a brush work well. More space than the oil though.

Semi-agreed. If you look closely, the mouse pointer (which they use to activate Chrome) is positioned over the "Forward" button in the browser; it looks like they let a page load completely, navigate back to Google, then the speed test is how long it takes to rerender the page from the cache.

Still, totally awesome ad. Loved every second.

Finally, the amazing user interface of git combined with the legendary server-side performance and scalability of mercurial!

I'm glad that happens to you too. I thought I was going insane.

Super, super awesome. Just a few niggles:

- The pi marker on the x axis stays fixed. As far as I can tell it doesn't really refer.

- phi is increasing, but the construction of the graph makes it look like phi should be decreasing. Seems like the circle should be on the right, with the line moving leftward and the phi values marked on the x axis receding in that direction as well.

- I'd like to be able to drag the graph around.

No one likes a whiner, so I tweaked a bit: http://doormouse.org/trig

That was incredibly charming, and a well-composed limerick to boot.

I spent the better part of a day once trying (and failing) to explain the difference between files, folders, documents, email messages, mailboxes, pictures, icons, programs, docked programs, etc., to an 80+ year old friend of the family. The ipad's emphasis on task-oriented, direct manipulation of data make for a much more straightforward metaphor: there's no cognitive distinction between the Pages document as browsed for object and real live document, no explicit saving or "saving as" or filing, no hat trick of intermediary representations between any one task and any other.

When friends ask me what's so great about the iPad, I can never think of a good answer. Usually I just show them the smule magic piano, which keeps them busy for a few minutes; the savvier ones say, "what, so it's just a toy for like two year olds?" For them, I'll keep this video waiting in the wings.

For all the promise of multitouch, everywhere-connectivity, 10 hour computing, etc., the best parts of the iPad are the things you can't see because they no longer exist.

If you press too far away you can make bad notes. This mode is actually pretty intensely fun if you try to tap the right places.

Misses the point. Apple already released their TV and gaming console, and it's called the iPad.

I think you need one more variable in there, but yeah that's the right idea :)

There are a few of these (or similar) on display at the San Francisco Exploratorium; well worth a visit if you've never been.

I made a simple RMagick script to generate these from animation frames. Turns out it even works well with full-color images. See: http://doormouse.org/illusion/ (interactivity only works in browsers that support the HTML5 range element)

That's a very important distinction to make, which a lot of people elide right over (I'm looking at you, singularitarians). We've been moving really fast recently, but the destination is pretty mediocre in a lot of ways. C.f. Warren Ellis: "Having a nice robot phone is not an acceptable substitute for a future." http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2010/05/start/...

Urban Airship has a similar service (even priced similarly): http://urbanairship.com/ Their focus is specifically mobile apps, & they have nice sample code for iPhone/Android/Blackberry. Gets spendy faster than Amazon, but I've used it for personal stuff and it's really easy.

Ex.: I do a lot of database work recently, so when I kick off a 90min query, at the end I ping them with some JSON and my phone meows. (Meow! Stop drinking! Your query is done!)

UGC is overrated. He mentions this in his article: Twitter, e.g., is thinking out loud and not a lot more. Yeah, it's fun, but is it good for you? Sure, why not. Twitter's a conversation at least. But have you ever read a YouTube comment worth reading? And it's damn hard to find a blog, even a really good blog, where the "Comments" h2 tag isn't a sign to gtfo before you remember how stupid other people are.

I think there's a parallel to be drawn between user-generated content like comments* and what the Web has done to the magazine format. Compare say Slate.com with a really good old-media magazine like Harper's or the New Yorker. The former is throwaway, largely vapid, blog-format pageview fodder, terrible podcasts, or dull echo-chamber commentary on the real, long-form kind of reporting and thought perpetrated by the latter. Slate pushes more words than Harper's, it's probably fair to say (and scare-quote) that they "actively engage" more of their "readership" than Harper's, but this is not an unmitigated good. Sometimes it's good to stop and take a breath and think, even if it's just for the 1.5 seconds you lose having to hit the home button before you can switch to your IM client.

This isn't a categorical judgement on "content creation", but it's important to consider what exactly is meant by "content". Jarvis seems to be longing for the brave, relatively new world where you can add your blather to the bottom of the first page (~180 words, skip the rest) of a Time.com article on the Michael Jackson heirs. The iPad is perfectly capable of thoughtful aggregation and creation of content; what it doesn't lend itself to is millennial ADHD "multitasking" and throwaway content. (I think there's a breed of geek that has the idea that the internet really is a lot like the Matrix: you get images and text thrown at you for a while and all of a sudden "I know kung fu". No, you don't, you just wasted hours of your life passing your eyes over disconnected words that you will never remember, synthesize, or regain.)

If you're interested in reading a book or two, thinking about them a while, recording your thoughts, maybe make a drawing or two, a blog post, etc., the iPad is perfectly capable of aiding your schemes. If you absolutely must watch two TMZ video feeds (and firstpost on the comments thread natch) while updating your work/home/secondary work tweetdeck streams and copywriting top-ten lists for your blogs.com subsidiary, yeah, you're going to want something different, but I don't want to be your friend.

*aware of the irony thx

I think it's because they want to think of it as a system, not "just" a device. You never use the definite article before an operating system, for example, or a piece of software. "Download music on iTunes", "manage your photos with Mac OS X", "read the morning news on iPad".

It does sound damn weird though.

I feel compelled to link to some prior work in this area, 2002's A Dead Fish Gains the Power of Observation by Zammuto et al. (I can't find the books, they must be in La Jolla: http://www.last.fm/music/The+Books/_/A+Dead+Fish+Gains+the+P...)

Also, ActiveRecord? No thanks.

Cute, but having trouble seeing how that's any better than the grade-school algorithm it's based on. (What, we have to add in unary now? This is progress?) You still have to carry, you still perform n^2 operations for n-digit numbers; the difference is you need a lot more paper and time, and it makes for a better video. (And God help you if you have to multiply any nines...)

Now, someone show me a convolution-based n log n multiplication algorithm you can do quickly with pen and paper and I'll be impressed. :)