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iPad – one month later

iPad, Photography

Just get one.

As the ultimate early adopter, having got mine on iPad Day, April 3, 2010, there is always the risk that anything I write about the iPad is tainted by a refusal to admit that it has serious flaws. Egg-on-face is not a particular favorite here any more than it is in your home.

And yes, I have written almost as much about this device as I did about the 5D which rocked my world to the core. That’s because it is every bit as revolutionary as that now classic Canon camera.

But I have no need to lead you up the garden path of denial. Rather, I would prefer to guide you to the road of enlightenment and realization. What the full frame sensor did for DSLRs the iPad will do for photography and the graphic arts. There is no longer any need to excuse the silly little display on your phone or camera when showing someone your pictures or sharing you ideas. You display them, instead, in glorious, high definition color, with your choice of sound track to jolly things along.

Lest you continue to think I’m full of it, let me tell you the single worst thing about the iPad. First, I should explain that I manage money for a living. I cannot think of a more data intensive occupation and in a turbulent world where emotions and markets (the same thing) can turn on a dime, it’s truly a 7 by 24 business. The money manager is always hungry for information. That means that most sunny mornings you will find me walking the resident Border Terrier a couple of blocks down to Broadway where we hang out at one of the many street places happy to serve us a snack and a coffee. It’s natural therapy which does much to improve the workday. Naturally, almost all the snack places have wifi (this is Broadway, Burlingame, Northern California, not Broadway, Pig Heaven, Arkansas) and the first thing I do is start reading on the iPad while waiting for service. Well, it’s getting awfully difficult to do that as before you know it I am surrounded by fellow diners of all ages and have to go into demonstration mode. So my productivity drops while Apple’s sales soar. That is the very worst thing about the iPad experience.

Still, if that’s the very worst you can say about the iPad, you can bet that the shock of the new will pass quickly enough when everyone has one. And judging by this, that should be any day now:

I suspect that over the next year or two, taxpaying US households will have several iPads – one for each bedroom, one for the home theater, one in the workshop, one for the kitchen, one for the au pair, etc. Non-taxpaying ones will have one provided at no cost by working people. Any business dependent on record keeping, diagnosis, analysis, retrieval, sharing will have many. Medicine, law, manufacturing, sales, science, engineering, publishing, teaching, photography, architecture, real estate, the military, design and production – all will become dependent on these keyboard free, inexpensive tools to get things done better and faster than those without. As GPS models proliferate, a whole new range of location sensitive applications will appear as if by magic, leveraging the device’s power and utility. As speech recognition improves, the last vestiges of need for a keyboard will disappear. Have you ever thought how much productivity is destroyed by the simple act of typing? Libraries will disappear (we can develop the real estate for profitable use) and Weyerhaeuser‘s business will halve as the need for dead trees falls. It’s not just that we will not be making paper books anymore. The new frugality will see smaller homes and no bookcases. Both the homes and the bookcases are made from …. yes, you guessed it!

Make no mistake, the first mover advantage enjoyed by Apple with the iPad is non-trivial. Heavily patented, it has already seen two mediocre would be competitors fold – HP’s Slate and Microsoft’s Courier – both before a single one was sold. Of course the one great application MSFT had which would be a natural for the iPad, the Encarta encyclopedia with interactive content, was discontinued a few months back. Such is the Beast of Redmond.

So for those of you holding out because you have to pay the “Apple premium” or whatever silly reason you have come up with, good luck to you. I have no time to look over my shoulder while I do my job, and my clients thank me mightily for the unfair advantage which I enjoy over you.

Comments on this post are open unless, that is, you are in Arkansas, or ArrghCanSore as they pronounce it down there.

Disclosure: No AAPL position.

Beautiful Planet

iPad, Photographers

Gorgeous photography.

A newly released iPad app displays the globetrotting work of photographer Peter Guttman.

It’s called Beautiful Planet, will run you all of $1.99 and showcases Guttman’s work in the best way possible, using the full iPad screen in landscape format. It’s the first photo display app which does the iPad justice, mainly because the quality of photography is as good as it gets.

Tap the opening screen and you see a scrollable map of the world.

Touch a thumbnail and you are transported to a show of pictures from that region of the world. Rather than spoil the fun, I’ll just say that it’s the best $1.99 you can spend on pictures and shows what a transformative display device can do to showcase your work. A coffee table book in your shoulder bag, weighing 1.5 lbs.

Now just imagine how this will look on a future 21″ iPad!

Photoshop CS5

Software

Things are not looking so good at ADBE.

If I were the CEO of Adobe I would be getting pretty worried.

Look at the issues:

  • Flash is going to die. Apple refuses to use it on its mobile devices and the alternative, HTML5, runs on everything, is bug free, fast and doesn’t spool up the fans in your computer when launched, drawing large amounts of power
  • Acrobat is mature and has no growth potential
  • No meaningful offerings for mobile computing
  • An entrenched culture of low energy and late to market
  • No focus, with time wasted on slagging Apple rather than making new products
  • The worst customer service on the planet, bar none
  • A core product which is, let’s face it, dead

Yes, that core product is Photoshop. Just as the LP reached perfection within its limitations when the CD was launched, so has PS reached a like peak and really has no place left to go.

The only significant additions to CS5 over CS4 are built in lens aberration correction (which you can get in a $25 PS plugin named PTLens which I recommend unreservedly) and Content-Aware Fill.

The latter option will be beloved of advertisers and dictators. Now when the Russians next rewrite their history books (“Let me check the history. Have we written it yet?”) and decide that Lenin is now persona non grata their army of retouchers will be replaced by a dude with CS5 which will likely as not be a pirate copy. Two key strokes and, hey presto, Comrade Lenin is gone.

Lenin? Nah! He was never in our band

What has not changed in CS5 is the awful user interface, one of the worst there is, or the egregious cost, hardly justified by ADBE finally making the thing run in 64-bit mode. Sure, a few pros will be unable to live without it, but a few pros do not constitute meaningful earmings per share, and if I was running Adobe, I would definitely be fixated on those:

A tale of two companies.

Adobe needs to craft some really innovative products, like Lightroom, for the mobile user. An iPad-using photographer is rarin’ to process his pictures on the road and a touch enabled, rethought Lightroom would be a hot seller. But, when you realize that the only reason Lightroom exists is because Apple came out with Aperture, forcing Adobe to react, then it’s not like you conclude that the people running Adobe, who seem to prefer spending their time slagging Apple over Flash use (or non use), are about to suddenly get it.

Think about this. Storage in the iPad is currently limited, so not much space for your RAW files. But a new mobile processing app will allow you to make all your changes on the road and then simply upload the RAW sidecar file with your processing data, which is very small, to your cloud storage. Thereafter you delete that day’s RAW originals from the iPad, once more freeing up space, your snaps remain on an SDHC card and your processing changes reside in the cloud. Once home you re-download the RAW originals from your SDHC card (at $20 for 8gB it’s not like you need to save on these) then your desktop app goes out to the cloud, downloads the minuscule sidecar files and hey presto! you are ready to export or print. Just don’t hold your breath waiting for something like this from Adobe.

At $660 for basic CS5 or $200 for the upgrade from CS4 I would say save your money and wait for someone else to come up with the next generation of photo processing tools unless, that is, you are in the Politburo.

As for ADBE stock – a great short after the near term earnings bump from CS5. Sad really, as without Adobe and Postscript and Photoshop, the Mac would likely not exist today.

Me? I continue to use CS2 (in Rosetta mode!) and still dread every time I have to roundtrip to it from LR2. My use is now restricted solely to correction of converging verticals.

Hullo? Hullo?

iPad

Doofus gets his iPad.

The company is huge. It dominates the globe in its sector. It has enormous annuity-like revenue streams from its products. It is massively arrogant, complacent and cocksure. It’s CEO is one of the worst in America. It is doomed to fail.

GM in 1960?

No, Microsoft in 2010.

No credible mobile OS. No cloud presence. No new ideas. Ever. Just a stream of tired re-releases of Office and Windows. That a company with no vision should name its marquee product Windows sort of redefines spin.

So, ever interested in sharing a scoop with readers, I am pleased to share a snap of MSFT’s CEO, the dunce who famously derided the iPhone as a toy on its launch three years ago, (sales 60 million and counting), enjoying his first encounter with an iPad.

MSFT CEO Steve Ballmer tries the iPad

A well connected friend at MSFT was there and has disclosed what Ballmer was saying as he repeatedly knocked on the iPad’s screen:

“Hullo? Hullo? Is there anyone in there? Can you hear me?”

Update – this just in:

Here’s a perfect example of why MSFT is doomed to failure. Any company which has such contempt for its customers in constantly putting out rumors about non-existent products deserves to fail. And this one actually had people excited, with good reason:

MSFT’s iPad killer …. is dead.

Guess the screen must have been too small for a good knuckling. DNA, my backside. They simply ran out of duct tape which they were using to stick two iPads together ….

Update April 30, 2010: The rumor mill is reporting that HP has decided to cancel the Slate. No surprise there. Windows and 5 hour battery lives just don’t cut it any more. Indeed, the main reason HP just bought the struggling Palm business is for its Web OS – a mobile OS that actually works reliably, unlike Windows Mobile.