I am seriously impressed with Texterity. I just converted my subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education from print to digital. It only saved me about $10/yr, but I kept throwing out a lot of paper. I was concerned that I’d miss browsing through the hard copy, but having sat down today and read through the digital version on my iPad, I’m wondering why I didn’t switch earlier! Texterity is the vendor that the Chronicle selected to deliver their content, and the HTML5 content is fantastic. Fast, legible and intuitive. I was floored when I absent-mindedly used a “page flick” gesture and the page turned. Doh! The way it should work! Apparently there are a lot of magazines that use this technology but today was my first experience. I’ll be looking for other magazines in this format. Check out this Wikipedia article for more on Texterity.

A physical keyboard or a virtual one? That’s a chioice which is playing out on many mobile devices these days. I’m prompted to muse about this topic by an excellent article in Network World on the evolution of the virtual keyboard and the explosive growth of the tablet and smartphone market. Use of a virtual keyboard is not a Hobson’s Choice to take it or leave it, as there are a continuum of options offered for device interfaces. Bluetooth connectivity on tablets and smartphones gives the flexibility of matching input need with the tool. I use the virtual keyboard extensively on my iPad, but also carry a Bluetooth keyboard in my backpack for text-intensive operations. I’m intrigued by the power of multitouch gestures and alternatives such as Swype (though I have not tried Swype). I’m a good touch typist, and that is as much a curse as a blessing when one considers changing input techniques. I think that the point made in the NW article about generational preferences is intriguing and likely will be a big factor in future user interface (UI) designs. We are strongly tied to the past. The Qwerty keyboard itself was intentionally designed for inefficiency, to keep the complex mechanical systems of early typewriters from jamming. I’m optimistic that the capabilities of multitouch display in our mobile devices will encourage the innovation necessary to move us beyond the typewriter that’s the anchor keeping us from flowing down the river of progress.

Santa brought me an Apple TV (ATV) in his bag this Christmas, and now that I’ve finished my holiday travels, I thought I’d hook it up and try it out. First, I’m truly amazed at how small it is! It comes with Apple’s elegant and minimalistic packaging, with the box, including its power cord, remote, startup manual, and iOS-based ATV unit itself measuring only 4.25 inches square and 2.5 inches thick. Its destination will be hooked to a TV at the beach, so today’s hookup was only temporary. However, Jan and I were soon talking about going to the Apple store to pick up another one. At $100, it’s a deal!

Setup was easy. I connected an HDMI cable, plugged in the power cord, and then it found my wifi and prompted for the password. I entered my Apple ID, and that’s the extent of the required setup. However, I also set up my Netflix account, my Mobile Me account, iTunes sharing (from my iMac) and checked other settings like the screensaver.

I played tunes from iTunes sharing, played video through iTunes sharing, played some smooth jazz streaming radio, tried Netflix (interface to Netflix is great, much better than the browser interface), pulled up some photos, and poked around. I used Airplay to stream Pandora from my iPad and that worked great! The ATV has a YouTube client of it’s own which I didn’t try, but I did use Airplay to send a YouTube video from my iPad, and that worked great.

All in all, I’d have to say I’m very pleased with the ATV. I’ve got a Mac Mini with some Bose Companion 5 speakers as my “media center” and I’ll keep that in place probably…though, it’s slow enough it can’t do HD video from Netflix, whereas the ATV has no problem with HD. If I had a more traditional audio/video receiver setup I think I’d switch, but it’s the cost of the receiver and home theater speakers that’s holding me back, not any issues with the ATV. It’s a helluva box, and I can see why Apple has sold a million of them!

I sat down tonight to do a quick, 5 minute update of the firmware on my Airport Extreme router to the latest revision, 7.5.2. I should have known better; never update a system that’s working perfectly well! I did the update of the Airport Extreme and the network-extending Airport Express, and both seemed to go well. However, I noticed that I had very sluggish connectivity. I have the Airport Extreme plugged in behind my ATT U-verse 2Wire router in DMZ configuration, so I tried a wired connection to the 2Wire to check on possible ATT problems. Working like a champ. Smokin’, in fact. Hmmmm….I googled on problems with this firmware update and came up with a number of hits and found a forum entry on the Apple site to be spot on. I hooked up a laptop with wireless active and a wired link to the 2Wire gateway, and downgraded the firmware back to 7.4.2. Worked like a champ. My speculation is that my Airport Extreme is an old first generation Extreme, and that’s the difficulty. I do know that I won’t be updating the firmware on this again, unless it specifically addresses this issue.

The FCC issued a new ruling today, affirming network neutrality. It was was not as complete a decision as preferred by proponents of neutrality, but it seems that it will be a very important ruling. It allows differentiation in wireless networks, stating that these are different entities that require different rules. Some on the panel think that this did not go far enough, that an Internet connection is an Internet connection (and I agree on that), but I agree that it is better to affirm neutrality on wired networks than to not resolve the issue for another two years, as Commissioner Michael Copps stated. The rules state that carriers cannot block legal traffic, and they cannot “unreasonably discriminate” against types of traffic. Those “weasel words” leave enough ambiguity to cause some problems, I’m sure, and will keep the lawyers busy, but the principle is important to codify.

Carriers and their supporters claim these rules will not allow for return on investment and will stifle innovation. I think though, that consumers should be able to pay for the bandwidth to their local networks based on the traffic needs, and not suffer discrimination based on what bits they send or receive. I would be more sympathetic to the carriers if I didn’t think that they were trying to protect a dying business model for delivery of subscription TV. The success of Netflix has the cable providers in particular looking for ways to sustain their historic revenue models. However, locking consumers into a limited set of choices is not it. If we each had many ISP’s that we could contract with for broadband access, I’d be more sympathetic to the statements of the free market advocates who state that the marketplace will take care of abuses. The problem is that most people only have one choice for wireline broadband, and that’s their cable company. In urban and suburban areas, you may have two or three, but that’s not broadly the case. I’m fortunate that I have access to both cable (Time Warner) and telco (U-verse). Eighteen months ago I moved from Time Warner to U-verse for higher bandwidth and have not looked back. Now, what I want is symmetric bandwidth, with higher upload speeds, though I am much happier with U-verse speed 18Mb down/1.5Mb up than the offerings from Time Warner.

The bottom line? Today is a big day, and I think that the Internet innovation machine will continue to churn and create new and exciting options, thanks to today’s FCC ruling.

I’d not given AirPlay (the capability in iOS 4.x to stream media to cooperating devices) too much thought, as I don’t have an Apple TV (yet). However, a conversation with my sister over the Thanksgiving weekend got me curious about the relationship of AirPlay and AirTunes and whether an iOS device could use an Airport Express to stream music. I use an Airport Express as a network extender in my house, but had never hooked up speakers to it. I checked my iTunes and it could see the AE and stream music – on to the iPad! But, no, the media redirect button was not there 🙁 . A bit of googling showed that it seemed to work for some folks and not others. A common theme though was a soft reset of the iPad. I was skeptical (some said that didn’t work) but it was easy to try. Bingo. Worked like a champ. Checked my wife’s iPad – was not showing Airplay, reset and there it was. Streamed iPod, YouTube, and Pandora. I’m thinking that this feature is going to grow in mindshare as folks play with it. I’m looking forward to that Apple TV that’s on my Christmas list 😉 So, the story seems to be that Airplay is an evolution of AirTunes, that it works in the legacy AirTunes environment and the emerging AirPlay ecosystem.

This is how printing on the iPad is supposed to work! I was disappointed with the way that AirPrint was rolled out in iOS 4.2.1 since it only supported a very limited set of printers. The word on the street is that technical problems were behind it, but still it’s not very as usable as-is. A friend mentioned that Printopia might be a solution to check out. I’d read up on PrintCentral, a $10 iOS app that handles printing but does it from the context of its own app, through the “send to” interface, its own browser, and other applets. Not exactly the way I wanted to see it work. Enter Ecamm’s Printopia. I was already a user of their iGlasses software, which provides extensive functionality for enhancing video to compensate for low light and many other effects.

Printopia is a $10 app for Mac OSX (no Windows version) that simply takes any printer accessible to your Mac and enables access to that printer thru AirPrint for any iPad on your network. I installed Printopia on my Mac (it installs into the system preferences) and immediately the “print” dialog on all AirPrint-enabled apps could see the two printers visible, plus a “print to PDF” option which stores a PDF image of the page on disk on the Mac. This worked on my iPad and my wife’s, and fits with the AirPrint model (much more elegant than a separate printing app). Speed was excellent, just as quick as native printing on the Mac, and image quality (to the Xerox Phaser) was also outstanding. Bottom line is that this is highly recommended!

I’m using an external keyboard with my iPad to write this.  I had an Apple bluetooth keyboard (the newer aluminum one) with a laptop at the office.  I consolidated computer setups a couple weeks ago, and found that I didn’t need the keyboard for my Mac, so I decided to try it on the iPad.  I was skeptical, in that it sort of takes away from the portability of the iPad.  However, after a few days of using it last week, I’m changing my tune.  First, as with other bluetooth devices, you can walk in and out of range and reacquire the connection automatically when close enough.  That means that I can have the keyboard on my desk, paired to the iPad, and when I leave for a meeting and leave the keyboard behind, the connection breaks; when I come back, it’s there again.  Not novel, but sort of a “dock” if you want to think about it that way.  Things that are handy are to use the keyboard to wake the iPad from sleep and enter my passcode, to start/stop iPod functions (such as podcast playback), change the volume, etc.  Screen brightness can be controlled as well, which is handy, if I’ve been outside and had the brightness turned up, and want to turn it down when I get back to my desk.  It really does make entry of text considerably easier, especially if you are a reasonable touch-typist, as I am.  It’s also easy to turn the keyboard on and off easily.  As you turn off the keyboard, the bluetooth icon dims on the iPad, and you can then use the onscreen keyboard normally.  Of course, you can use the “eject” button on the keyboard to open and close the virtual keyboard.  I have wondered about battery impact, but in my (so far) limited use, it doesn’t seem to have any observable effect.

All in all, a very useful addition to the iPad, and one that you can take with you or leave behind. That makes it a very flexible solution! 

I’m at Educause 2010 now. I’m currently unwinding from a long day of meetings and sitting on the balcony of my hotel, watching the cool Pacific breeze sway the palms, and watching the moon traverse the southwestern sky. As I intend this to be a technology post, I should probably switch gears 🙂 . This is my first business trip since I got my iPad, and I left the laptop at the office in its dock and only brought the iPad. Have I missed the laptop? Not one minute! On the plane out, I graded papers while listening to tunes on the iPad, and then watched a movie. When I got to my hotel, I found that it offered AT&T wifi, and the iPad automagically connected, switching from 3G. Email and a bit of Facebook before bed, and I was ready for the first day.

I spent the first day here at Google’s Irvine office at the EduCAB meeting. Took extensive notes using Penultimate, and emailed the notes back home to colleagues that couldn’t make the trip. Of course Google offered visitor wifi, and I could stay in touch with email or IM. Of the 20 folks attending EduCAB, five were exclusively using iPads rather than laptops. Not bad for a device that’s only been on the market 5 months.

Today I attended the main conference. As I wandered the corridors of the Anaheim Convention Center from session to session, I noticed two trends…there were lots of iPads – not the 25% at EduCAB, but probably 5-10%; also, I noted the laptop users clustered around charging stations and sitting on the floor near the few wall outlets. That was me last year, but no more. I’m convinced that one of the “killer apps” of the iPad is battery life. If competitive tablets don’t offer the same longevity, they will be at a severe disadvantage.

Late this afternoon I sat in a great session on the impact of the Internet, based around two 2010 pop culture books – Carr’s Shallows, and Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus. I’d read Carr’s book but not Shirky’s. A few taps and the Kindle copy was ensconced on my iPad. I’ll read a chapter before bed tonight. I joked with the presenters as the end of the session that they’d cost me $12.99 plus tax for attending.

Have I missed the laptop? No…the iPad can be used for content creation as well as consumption. Can you stay in touch, look at docs & spreadsheets? Sure. I plan to work on a presentation for an upcoming conference on the flight back. The iPad is a computer, a book, a stereo, a TV…its an overused term, but it truly is a paradigm shift.

There are many great app updates coming out right now for devices in the iOS ecosystem. I think that the app developers are out of the stage of “O my gosh, I better get something out there” to a regime where they are working their punch lists and feature request lists. I’m happily using a number of these on my iPad. Apple put in features to their office suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) that dramatically improve usability. You can now copy files to and from iDisk and WebDAV servers. This, and the ability to import and export as pages, PDF and doc formats makes these tools even more useful. I am able to now use my iPad and edit files from UNCG file servers, or do a quick view through apps like Goodreader (which can also manage WebDAV storage). Goodreader itself has a great update, now allowing annotation of PDF files, stored as PDF. Penultimate, an app I use extensively for note taking, as several improvements in areas such as note management and VGA out (useful for virtual whiteboarding). The Mobile Me gallery app now supports the iPad. Maybe we are getting out of the “fart app” stage and really focusing on usability! Looking forward to iOS 4.2 in November!