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Thoughts on the iPad

It’s not enough to make a gadget that is critically successful or popular with technology enthusiasts (or even Apple enthusiasts). Like the iPhone, part of the benefit is that the iPad will be a platform that can be extended. This creates a kind of externality. It has to be a commercial success for it to be maximally useful because a larger installed base will attract more developers to build apps for the device. Similarly, it will generate more incentive for people to innovate while designing media to be experienced with it (those future of magazine demos are not going to make themselves).

I don’t know how many users a device needs before the third-party software is truly great, but I know from personal experience that OS X didn’t have too much great software in 2001 but it did by 2005. The iPhone had great software in the immediate weeks that the App Store opened its doors. I think this has more than a little to do with the expectations of developers with an eye toward the number of potential customers.

The casual users subsidize the overall computing experience for the enthusiasts and power users. Not only do they encourage software development, but as a product becomes popular the input prices are going to be driven lower allowing for a manufacturer to maintain profits while lowering the price of a product. I think those are reasons enough that we shouldn’t ridicule a device that might attract “our parents.”

The individual returns to a product success, such as the iPad, explain at least to some extent my (and perhaps other’s) so-called fanboyism. Last decade, I saw successful AAPL stock performances as a sign that it was safe to buy Apple products. I root for Apple’s products to succeed not because it vindicates my choices, but because it demonstrates the stability and the likely longevity of the technological platform I have hitched my research, teaching, and hobbies to. Switching to a different OS or really switching away from the entire technological constellation that is provided to me by Apple would require large transaction costs. While most of my files would be quite portable (LaTeX, PDF, C++, Stata, jpg, etc.), the overall burden seems like it would be quite large. And so, I remain quite thankful that there’s been precious little reason to think about switching and every reason to look at the iPad as another step in the right direction.

Spotlight is My Calculator

Spotlight is Neven Mrgan’s calculator. It’s mine too.

Setting up a Mac

I need a place to put this. It might as well be here. When recent switchers ask for advice I typically send some version of this list. I should write more about software later. Note that the information here might be dated as well.

Setting Up A Mac and Os X
———————————————————
1. Make an admin account then add user account (use your user account for everyday usage).
2. In Safari (turn on tabs, turn off start safe apps).
3. Clean out some of the RSS feeds that Safari has already subscribed too

Software to Get

Internet Applications
NetNewsWire (feed reader)
Firefox and Opera (alternate browsers, also camino)
Cyberduck (free file transfer app, ftp/sftp, WebDav, etc.)

Productivity
TextWrangler (best of free text editors, allows vertical/column based text selection)
VoodooPad Lite (a notebook wiki type thing for your computer, very useful and free)
MS Office (or OpenOffice.org)
iWork (Apple’s MS Office alternative)
Skim (PDF reader and annotator)

Audio/Video Pluggins and Players
Real Player
Flash plug-in (get latest version)
Perian (plays flash right in QuickTime and then all other apps like Keynote)
Flip-4-Mac (plays WMV video files right in QuickTime)

Utility
Stuffit Expander (free, some archives still use this format instead of zip, etc.)
Applescripts (turn on GUI scripting, get the Safari ones from apple’s page, etc)

Backup/Sync
SuperDuper! (back-up software that clones internal HD to an external HD, or Free CarbonCopyCloner)
ChronoSync (for syncing two computers)

Widgets
iCal Events
Scoreboard widget (baseball, still works a little)
Ta-Da Lists widget (broken spring 2009)

Image Editors
Acorn (decent image editor for $50)
LiveQuartz (simple free image editor)
Image Tricks (for messing with photos mostly)
Gimp.app (free and clunky)

Music/Video
Amazon music downloader
eMusic download manager
xAct (free, shn/flac de/encoder)
Audacity (free, simple audio editor)
iMovieHD (also called iMovie06, free from apple website)
Sentui (free, get songs off iPods without syncing to iTunes)
VLC (free, video player of many codecs)
iSquint (flash video converted to mp4)
ScreenFlow ($99, makes screencasts and video lectures)

Stats
Stata
R (stats, free)

Optional:
TeXShop via MacTeX (LaTeX distribution with bibdesk, also get eqn ed/serv like TeXFog)
Xcode (Apple’s development IDE, needs to do installation)
Chicken of the VNC (login to remote computers)
RDC (remote desktop connection from MS for logging into windows)
EagleFiler (archive email, organize PDFs, recipes, webpages, etc.)
PDF to Keynote (small utility does what it says)
Taco HTML Edit (new version no longer free)
Quinn (tetris clone)
Adobe Reader (Preview is better; sometimes nice to use though)
Skype (free)
Bittorrent
DarwinPorts and Fink (for installing UNIX applications)
VPN (get from your school/company to log into their network)
AppDelete
CombinePDF (with new Preview.app this isn’t really needed, less good was join_PDFs [http://homepage.mac.com/jonn8/as/html/Join_PDFs.html])

Services
thisservice (markdown)
service scrubber (clean up the services menu)
wordservice(from devonthink)

More Information

Info on using Windows with bootcamp or parallels:
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2006/06/27/parallels-desktop-for-mac.html

Useful webpages:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/ [database of downloads]
http://www.macworld.com/ [news]
http://www.macosxhints.com/ [help and hints]
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars [news+rumors]
http://www.automatorworld.com/ [all about automator]
http://daringfireball.net/ [mac nerd blog]
http://www.dougscripts.com/ [itunes and applescripts]
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~benhdj/Mac/unix.html [unix tips for os x]
http://osx.iusethis.com [reviews of top applications]

I update this post from time to time.