chan.V » tech

iPad Review – Part 1 – First Thoughts

Vincent — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 01:43:59 +0000

I’ve just received an iPad as my birthday present. I’m totally stoked about it – however, I was never really part of the early-adopter scene (I much preferred to wait until the 2nd or 3rd gen to drop my cash), so this is pretty exciting and uneasy for me.

I’m writing this review hopefully to give you another perspective (lots of the tech blogs that have or will write about it, are usually coming at an angle of early adopters), and cut through the hype (for example, the best surfing experience will likely not be on the iPad, contrary to Steve Jobs’s claim) to let you know what this device is all about.

The iPad I’ve received is an 16GB Wifi version, without 3G (I’m also planning to get an Android phone – so I’m looking into tether it to my smartphone and share the data) . My first impression of the device is that the screen is absolutely gorgeous – this is the kind of device gadget geeks like myself is waiting for, the kind of all-powerful, portable supercomputer you’d expect to see in sci-fi films. It really is quite thin – it’s hard to imagine that you basically have a small form-factor computer packed into a casing the thickness of a pop-tart.

There have been comments that the iPad is essentially a gigantic iPod Touch (iPod Touch Mega, anyone?). This is not far from the truth. The OS, UI is largely similar – if you had an iDevice before, this thing is basically pickup-and-go. Really, the learning curve is so low that you kind of feel like something is missing – have I really just gotten a giant iPod Touch?

That said, one of the major selling points of the iPad is that it is compatible with 150,000-something iPhone apps from the App Store. Pretty much all apps will be compatible on the iPad. However, the gotcha here is that the experience is not great – you’re either stuck with a tiny, true-to-the-form display of the app, or the scaled-up, ugly-to-the-bones pixelized version of the app – neither of which is very pleasant. Unfortunately, at the time of writing there’s also few apps for the iPad that matches their iPhone counterparts (why are there no good weather apps for the iPad yet?), but this will change in the next months. To me, this is a nice to have feature, but not something I’d look forward to use on a regular basis, so don’t buy too much into the hype around this one.

(Once multi-tasking is introduced in OS4, it would be cool if we can design an app to launch multiple iPhone applications on an iPad screen. It would be like a customizable widget dashboard on Macs, but with iPhone apps – there’s an idea!)

One of the reasons that many apps on iPhone do not show up on iPad, is that the large, beautiful screen and the powerful web browser simply eliminated the need to have an app (think about it – apps are basically web pages, initially condensed and designed to serve the tiny form-factor of smart phones).

Take Facebook, for example – the site looks works wonderfully on an iPad. The colors are crisp, clear and the full-fledged Safari browser is really fast. One of the first things you’ll notice is that how amazing webpages look in portrait mode – you see a lot more content at first glance, and scroll a lot less to find what you want. It really is a different way to experience the web – but whether or not it is the best is certainly up for debate…

To be continued – more to come about the kinks of iPad web browsing, book / graphic novel reading, getting work done and some really cool apps!

Feel free to leave a note for me if you have any questions, or suggestions to what you would like to know in the future posts!

p.s. I wrote this review on the iPad… Some thoughts coming around the touchscreen keyboard as well

The building blocks of the amazing Skype Brand

Vincent — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 01:47:14 +0000

I’ve always admired the Skype branding. Here’s the brand guide that they’ve released a little while ago. Aside from the pure aesthetic value, it’s quite fascinating to see the work, thoughts and process behind the design that we see everyday, and often take for granted.

Skype Brand Book

Here’s also a PDF version to download for keeps.

Posted via web from chanv

capture the whole webpage in a screenshot

Readability – works for iPhone / iPod Touch

Vincent — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:08:35 +0000

A little while ago I wrote about a handy web app called Readability, which reformats the often overwhelming mashup that is the web into a classy, easy-on-the-eyes newspaper-like column for reading.

It turns out Readability works great on the iPhone too!

Take this Ars Technica article for example:

And turn it into this with Readability:

Now, whether or not this is a favored improvement is debatable. Most sites nowadays offer an mobile version of their content, which is often good enough for reading in your hands. However, I’m a big fan of Readability’s style and I’m pretty surprised to find out how well it works on my iPod Touch.

To use Readability on your iPhone / iPod Touch, you’ll have to install the bookmarklet on the device. Follow the same steps I described on installing the Tumblr bookmarklet on your iPhone, except apply it on the Readability bookmarklet.

If you run into any trouble, feel free to e-mail me or leave a comment… otherwise happy reading!

3 Indispensable Firefox Extensions for Web Designers

Vincent — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:06:15 +0000

During my limited tenancy as a web designer, there were a couple constant annoyances that were like thorns on my side:

Figuring out HTML / RGB color codes when developing and styling pages.
Finding out the proper sizes to scale images to, depending on the nature and content of the page.

Granted, there are workarounds: for #1, you can simply hit PrintScrn to take a screenshot of the page (Command-Shift 3 or 4 on a Mac), and load it into any image edit application for analysis. #2, you’ll have to do a bit of guesstimate work and hope you’ll get it in a couple of tries.

There must be a better way of doing things – and there are. Being an avid Firefox user, I discovered two awesome extensions that made life good again – ColorZilla and MeasureIt.

ColorZilla is essentially your familar eye-dropper tool that gives you the color code of the item on-screen that you click on. It returns the color code in RGB as well as Hex, with the added bonus of auto-copying the color code onto the clipboard for pasting. There’s also a pretty cool Webpage DOM Color Analyzer, which shows you a palette containing a range of color used on the current webpage.

MeasureIt lets you draw a box overlay on any webpage and tells you the the width and height – perfect for any kind of layout work.

So there you go – two simple extensions that makes life a lot easier!

Just a note – you can find both extensions through the Firefox Add-on Browser, however at the time of writing MeasureIt is not supported by Firefox 3.6. You can still install it through the author’s website though.

No related posts.

Readability Makes Websites Readable

Vincent — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 06:01:01 +0000

Web application Readability turns a website you’re reading from this:

Into this:

Readability eliminates some of the common complaints about online content (poorly used colors, long running texts across a page) by reformatting the current page you’re browsing into a neat, black-on-white newspaper like column for easy reading with a click of a button (via a bookmarklet). You can also tweak the look-and-feel of the reformatted page to your liking.

You can check out Readability here.

Another tool that does more or less the same thing is Readable, with a lot more options but a bit less elegant looking.