A useful drawing tool.

The Pogo Stylus for the iPhone and iPod Touch works just fine with the iPad. In the picture it’s shown attached with the provided clip to my 3G iPhone, where it adds value if you have difficulty pecking away at the minuscule keyboard. But with the iPad it really comes to life.

I have been experimenting with an iPad drawing app named ArtStudio which lays low those unthinking statements from ‘experts’ that would have it that the iPad is an information recovery tool only. It’s a creative tool which will only move to strength over the next few quarters.

One thing I have wanted to do for a while is to create an app logo for this blog, PPP, which can be added to your desktop/laptop/iPhone/iPad home screen by simply clicking the ‘+’ sign in the Safari Menu Bar. Thereafter, when you need a fix and desire to read the best, commercial free writing on photography on the planet, with pithy asides at no additional cost, you simply invoke the desktop and click the logo. So that was my first creation using ArtStudio on the iPad and after a few swooshes with the Pogo stylus the thing was done:

Icon design for PPP

Yeah, so I like ballet, couture and art, but I also like my meat rare and my motions up and to the right. And I hope to jump on my old motorbike and run over some elderly ladies later today, in case you have any doubts about my orientation. So thrusting up and to the right it is.

Now I have to figure out the arcana of php or whatever the hell that code language is to plug this thing into PPP and make it clickable.

ArtStudio totally rocks – get it, along with a $12 Pogo stylus. You can set the stylus to draw lines offset from its point of contact, by the way, so that you can see what you are drawing.

Logo update:

I figured out how to do this for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Load this site in Safari, hit the ‘+’ on the MenuBar and choose ‘Add to Home Screen’ – renaming the logo PPP. You will see this on your mobile device:

Click on the icon and your favorite photography site now displays in iPhone-friendly format, thus:

Touch the down arrow and you will see these choices – including a link to send me an email:

Finally, touch Categories on this screen and you will see:

Still working on getting this right for the iPad. Grrr!

To foreign banksters, oligarchs and Colombians only.

Given the supply shortage and my natural proclivity to arbitrage every asset I own, I have decided to sell my iPad.

Delivered by overnight mail to any location on earth against receipt of cleared funds (used notes, non sequentially numbered are preferred) the price is a modest $1,999, shipping included. See below for important update. For a small premium to the retail price you can hold tomorrow in your hands today, or at least by Friday, if you get my drift.

Hang on a minute – this just in from HQ:

OK, scrap that earlier price. Yours for $3,999.

May be worth considering.

I have railed before about the terrible economics of most equipment warranties. Terrible, that is, for the buyers, not for the insurance companies which write them. And if there are three words guaranteed to put this taxpayer on guard, they are ‘politicians’, ‘lawyers’ and ‘insurance’. In the case of the insurance industry you have all three. Politicians bought with the legal bribes which pass as campaign donations in the US, lawyers dominating the ranks of insurer and his client, the politician, and of course, underwriters.

A successful insurance company is one which is the most adept at not paying claims – which is why they have armies of lawyers to obfuscate and bureaucratize the claims process – and one of whose worst unintended consequences is that they encourage the insured claimant to engage in fraud, “I’ll get my own back on those crooks” being the prevailing mindset.

So when the nice Geniuses at the Apple Store were through applauding me for blowing $1,300 on a couple of iPads on April 3, the next thing I was offered was – you guessed it – an insurance policy.

There are many slick marketing ways of disguising an insurance policy as something else, every insurer knowing that he and his cohorts are despised. One of the best at this is the American Automobile Association, or Triple A for short. Under the guise of Doing Good (sounds like Google to me) it’s nothing more than an insurance operation fronted for by the local tow truck operator. “We’ll get you out of trouble when you’re stuck” is the sales pitch when the reality is “Good luck getting anything other than a free tow from us, doofus”.

Apple, never one to throw away a good lesson, calls its insurance product AppleCare. You see, they really care about you and your Mac, though not so much when, like most of mine, it fails a few weeks out of the warranty period. That is nothing more than an opportunity for another sale or a jolly good hosing on fixing the old machine.

So I had given the issue of AppleCare some thought before iPad Day and decided against it, primarily because one of the very few Apple devices that actually lasted for me was my 2G iPhone. Given like technology in the iPad, and a general absence of moving parts – the latter limited to a few switches – I reckoned I would take my chances. However, once I started using the iPad (and, equally importantly, once our 8 year old got his hands on it – hey, I have to have someone to blame) I quickly concluded that this is one of the most droppable tools ever made. Slick all over with nothing to afford a good purchase for a one-handed pickup, it’s just asking to be dropped.

AppleCare, however, does not offer accidental damage coverage. I snooped around a bit and came across a business named FairTrade whose core focus seems to be on insuring electronics, cameras and the like. They boast an A- rating from Bests, the insurance rating people, but take no notice of that. These jerks rated AIG A+ right before it blew costing the US taxpayer over $100bn and counting. They must employ the people who didn’t make it at Standard & Poors, Moody’s and Ffitch, the criminal cabal which gave us Triple A ratings on CDO mortgages. But I did take time to scan the hundreds of rating on the web for their service and came away impressed.

Now it’s quite possible that a massive conspiracy at SquareTrade has them writing their own reviews. Remember how revered Enron was just weeks before it collapsed? But it’s a risk I am willing to take because their coverage does extend to accidental damage and is priced much the same as AppleCare which does not. The only catch in the fine print is that you mustn’t drop the thing in the first 30 days of ownership, but thereafter you are covered for 2 years from purchase.

Here’s their blurb:

Are they any good? How would I know? I have yet to make a claim. Which, of course, is the only test of an insurer’s integrity. So I’ll let you know when I do. And I suspect that’s a matter of when, not if, as I come from a family of serial droppers.

Disclosure: Long AAPL and no interest in SquareTrade.

An interesting exchange.

I was sitting on the couch with that insouciant boulevardier Bert the Border Terrier, whiling away a pleasant evening hour catching up on world markets on the iPad and enjoying the Unfair Advantage it confers upon the user when, appropriately enough, in comes an email from quite literally the opposite end of the world – Jakarta, Indonesia.

The iPad, as everyone except maybe the Pope knows by now (he seems to know nothing, or so he would have it), comes in three storage sizes, 16, 32 and 64gB, and I elected the 32gB version for the two I picked up on iPad Day last week.

The email came from American photographer Brandon Hoover, whose fine travel photography in Asia can be seen here. He wrote:

To which I replied (yes, that really is me in the picture – Cary Grant looks just like me):

Brandon followed up with:

And my response:

And finally:

Now at this juncture, Bert the Border came to life and inquired, none too politely, when I was going to put the iPad down so that he could get in some serious tree and lamppost action, so I donned my best English Tweed (OK, Scottish Tweed) jacket and off we went on a gorgeous California evening to commune with nature.

As luck would have it, a friend had recently given me his 3G iPhone (I got him into AAPL at $187 and it’s now at $242, so he owed me! My 2G is off to the recyclers after 3 years of hard work.) and I popped it in my pocket thinking no more of the matter. Then it occurred to me that maybe the above exchange might be of interest to readers, so I whipped it out (the iPhone, that is) and sent Brandon a quick request, using 3G no less, asking whether I might publish our exchange. He kindly approved the idea seconds later. Now you must admit that, no matter how blasé we get about technology, there is something incredible about walking your dog on a California evening at 7:25PM PDT and sending an email to Jakarta, Indonesia (or maybe it was Manila in the Philippines) with the reply coming back at …. 7:25PM PDT.

You can follow Brandon’s writings at his nicely designed blog and you don’t even need an iPad, though it looks just great on mine!

Read all my iPad ruminations by clicking here.

Good and improving.

Yesterday I looked at hardware issues relating to the iPad.

Today it’s Software.

Software:

The best way to introduce this piece is to show what’s on my iPad’s Home screen. I’m reproducing this real size so you can get a sense of that gorgeous display.

I always keep one spot open to make it easier to add/move apps. The dock holds the maximum of six apps and these are the ones I use most.

As you can see, for the most part it’s all business, entertainment being limited to iPod (music), iBooks (because it’s so out of sight good), Epicurious (I like to cook), IMDb (I’m a movie buff) and Netflix (just simply superb and something that good deserves a spot on the home screen). The rest has all to do with making money in the markets which is what I do for a living.

But what’s more important is what you do not see here and that is MobileMe. MM allows me to keep my desktop, iPhone and iPad in sync as regards Email, Contacts and Addresses and also provides cloud storage for moving files. While I do have the iDisk app on another page it’s still a work in progress as the iPad cannot open password protected spreadsheets I store there in Numbers. To do that I have to drop the spreadsheet on iTunes on my desktop then sync, whereupon it can be opened on the iPad with full password protection. I am not about to trust Apple (or any corporation, for that matter) with unprotected files wherein reside my crown jewels. I’m confident Apple will fix this oversight which will add a lot of power to Numbers, Pages and Keynote on the iPad.

The main alternative to MM is Google’s suite (mess?) of free applications. Anyone familiar with the user interface of those will realize that it compares unfavorably to Soviet era cameras for finish and polish. If you must use them, have at it, but I prefer cotton shirts to polyester with my Armani suits. And I trust a company which may be bound in a culture of theft even less than I trust one run by P T Barnum’s modern day version. You really think GOOG is Doing No Evil while it analyzes your usage patterns to better target you with advertising?

iPhoto is right now more business than pleasure for me. Getting a screenshot of a news story to a colleague for debate dictates holding the Home key, touching the on/off switch – which places the screenshot in iPhoto – then emailing the story from iPhoto. It’s far faster than it sounds and some time soon we will get screenshot apps which do this without iPhoto. I say ‘more business than pleasure’ as there are no processing controls in iPad’s iPhoto. At the end of the month I will receive the camera connection kit and will say more later. Still, this is version 1.0.

Numbers is a work in progress. I thought I would stress test it by importing a large spreadsheet with many formulae and lookup tables to see how it would cope. Here’s the warning message I received:

Not great. All the formulae worked fine but some of these errors – like the loss of Comments, headers (makes scrolling tough) and trendlines on charts make it of limited use for a money manager right now. Also lots of the row heights were wrong and too small, truncating data, and proved a pig to fix. Then next time you import it’s all wrong again. My major concern is that improvements will be slow (it took Numbers on the desktop two iterations just to get password protection ….) given Apple’s default assumption that most of its users are number blind. They prefer to focus on glamour and glitz in their apps, not hard core reality.

So where is the ROI with the iPad? Simple. Just look in the dock. NetNewsWire is the best RSS feed reader there is and totally explains the meaning of the mantra that has it that Information is Power. It pays for itself many times daily and I hope the authors make tons of money from it. They deserve to, after having given away the iPhone and desktop version for years. It syncs in background mode to all your devices using a Gmail account and works perfectly. Fidelity Investments speaks for itself. My clients and I have been with them for decades, I detest their lack of integrity (but at least I know where I stand) and they have the best execution in the retail business, even if their user interface sucks. Meh, I’m used to it by now and I get the satisfaction of calling them and proffering gratuitous abuse now and then. It’s innocent fun, and a great stress reliever after a visit to, say, an organization staffed solely by morons, like California’s DMV.

It’s hard to see how Mail and Safari can be improved on. If anything, Mobile Mail is even better than the desktop variant, and to all those complainers who say that the iPad/iPhone still lacks a unified mailbox for all your emails (coming to the iPad in the fall), all I can say is you are not thinking. Simply have all your other providers forward email to MobileMe and have the forwarded email automatically deleted from the providers’ servers. Then you only need setup Mobile Me on all your devices. Hey! Presto – a unified mailbox. MM is the single best thing you can buy for your connected devices. Further, once true multitasking and app switching come to the iPad with OS 4.0 in the fall, things will be even sweeter. Right now it’s a bit of a pain to interrupt reading to answer an email.

What’s that you say? MobileMe is just another annuity for Apple and a cost for me? Jeez, get real. Every company wants income annuities and that’s the ones you should be investing in. Suck it in and buy some stock in those. To make money you first have to spend it.

One important thing I have learned is that the three iPad apps for Thomson/Reuters, NYT Editors’ Choice and WSJ all cache content. So fire them up before leaving for a non-wifi location and when you get there you can happily read the news from locally stored content without wifi. The snag here is that NYT has yet to offer an app for all of its paper (what do you expect from the bunch of fools running that paper – they give content away free for heaven’s sake. Way to run a business.) WSJ has small pop up ads at the base of some screens but they are inoffensive and go away after a few seconds. WSJ is slow to load – 30 seconds – but the upside of that is that it caches a lot of content to take with you. If you want to access both WSJ.com and the iPad version, you need two subscriptions. You may accuse Murdoch of cheapening everything he touches (have you checked that parrot cage liner once known as The Times of London recently?), but the guy knows how to make money. Which beats the alternative.

Finally, for those of you into financial math with an engineer’s education (like me!) who love Reverse Polish Notation calculators (figures something so odd would be named after Polacks and as I am one, I should know), here’s the HP12C writ large:

Finally proper sized keys. And no waiting for an answer to a complex calculation. And the iPad is thinner! So there. And be honest. Which would you rather use?

Challenges:

The major hiccup in the iPad’s interface is the challenge of moving data to and from it. There is no Finder like the one you get with desktop OS X. You can bet that when Apple solves that issue it will be done right.

• Most data can be moved to or from the iPad using iTunes. One more step in the process as you have to sync and over-the-air sync is not yet available. That includes Apps, Music, Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts (useful business and photography information there), iTunesU (very interesting for people with an IQ in three digits), Books and Photos.
• Email is a direct interface and screenshots are sent through iPhoto for now.
• There is no native printing function (doubtless coming with OS 4.0 in the fall) and the one app I have tried to work around this, named Print Magic, is indistinguishable from a bilge pump. Both suck.
• Heavy typing dictates use of a keyboard and my Apple aluminum bluetooth one works fine, or you can get the dockable one, but having to input some commands by touch is a PITA. For now, until a more versatile keyboard comes along, use a desktop or laptop for heavy typing.
• Apps can be downloaded to iTunes on your desktop and syncd or downloaded directly to the iPad, just as with the iPhone, then syncd back to the desktop for backup. Nice. Too bad the App Store is so awfully organized. How can I search for new apps when I don’t know what they are named?
• Games? I don’t play games. Our eight year old does and the look on his face, plus the difficulty I have extricating the ipad from his hands, suggests it’s a winner in this genre. Maybe I need to buy a third? His, her’s and the boy’s. Yes, I definitely need a third. Maybe the 3G version.

Stability: I have had to reboot (hold the Home and On/Off switches down for a few seconds) just once during this first week of very heavy use. Use included downloading many apps, much app switching, hundreds of emails in and out, lots of Safari searches, movie, photo, music and book downloads, hundreds of RSS downloads and, of course, a real pounding from our 8 year old playing several different CPU-intensive games. That was necessitated by the WSJ, of all things. They released a bug fix for their app during the week and the new version refused to recognize my account. A reboot cured that. In other words, the device is a model of stability, much as I expected after three years’ experience with the iPhone and comparable with – maybe even more stable than – the desktop version of Snow Leopard.

Free books: There are many sites offering tens of thousands of free books in the ePub format used by the iPad. Two favorites are Project Gutenberg and Feedbooks, the latter even coming over with cover art. Download these to your desktop as there is no direct download to the iPad yet, though Apple has promised one.The ones from Project Gutenberg come with numbers for file names so re-title them before uploading to the iPad. To upload, drag and drop them on iTunes->Books then do a sync.

Here’s how my iPad iBooks screen looks:

The Churchill book was purchased, Winnie-the-Pooh comes with every US iPad and the rest are free. Plain covers are from Project Gutenberg.

I have read using the iPad for 2 hours at a time with no fatigue. It’s nice that you can adjust font size and type and screen brightness to get things just so. I find I prefer landscape orientation with the iPad for a traditional two page book layout. You know, like they used to make out of trees in the dark ages.

There are three other Library formats:

Titles:

Authors:

Categories:

Bottom line: I would hate to be running a Redmond, WA laundry right now, for they must all be overwhelmed with soiled underwear.