July 25, 2012  Update I couldn’t do it. I spent all month trying to get a Ruby dragon, and yesterday I got one. The egg was going to hatch today. But Jaryth played the game this morning, and he sped up the incubation (using all my gems) and then sold the dragon egg for gold I didn’t need. When I found myself almost crying because of this, I realized that I needed to stop playing this game. Dragonvale has been deleted from my iPad, and Jaryth hasn’t realized yet. I’m sure when he figures out that it’s gone, he’s going to scream bloody murder. But I couldn’t stand feeling angry at him over an animated image. No game is worth that.

So, I’ve had an iPad since the first day the iPad 1 came out. And I’ve been reading books in the Kindle reader for iPad almost that long. I am a long-time book reader. In fact, when I got the iPad I didn’t think that ebooks would hold that much of a draw for me. After all, I love the feel of a good book in my hand, the smell of the glue holding the perfect binding of the paperbacks together, the crispness of the pages, yes, even the jolt awake when the hardback falls into my face while reading in bed. But in the two years since the iPad 1 has come out, I’ve changed. I like to think of it as growing. Now, I prefer to read books on my iPad, iPod, and in the cloud reader on my laptop. I love that when I get to page 110 on my iPad, I can open up my iPod and be right there on that page. This is better than when in Jr. High I learned how to almost subconsciously remember where I was in a book without bookmarks to combat the teasing people who would grab my books from me and move or remove the markers in an effort to thwart my knowing where I was. (I also learned the best hiding places for reading at my Jr. High—back in the library stacks on one of the lowest shelves where no books were stored was the best. No bullies ever venture into the library.) When Apple changed the rules and removed the bookstore links from the apps, I quickly bookmarked your site in my mobile Safari and made sure that that bookmark was synched to all my devices. And when you announced the Kindle Store, I saved the location as an app on my iPad so I could always get to it quickly.

So, Apple has been pushing their “iPad App of the Year” in my face every time I open the app store for the last few weeks. So, because of repetition, I finally broke down and watched the video displaying it (see below). A very pretty blonde woman attempts to pretend that she’s manipulating the world’s largest wall iPad using Snapseed. Unfortunately, the only thing I got out of that video was that Snapseed can be very hard to use when pretending to use it on a giant wall iPad. Look at her expression when she’s trying to manipulate the photos. It’s as if she was struggling to get her hand in the right place, and then the director would yell “SMILE!” and she’d go “oh yeah, I’m supposed to be having fun!” and smile for a second. After about 4000 takes the crew was tired and the director gave up and just cut it together with what he had. I started wondering if the only point to the video was to get her model career started, as there seemed to be more images of her than of the app itself. I then went to my standby app evaluation: go to the app in iTunes (iTunes) and look at the Most Critical reviews first. Yep, here we are, from slugworthy: 1 star, “WAY overrated”. Slugworthy feels that filterstorm, photoforge2, and photogene2 are “MUCH better.” And hey! I already have those apps! Good, now I can go get an americano at *$ instead! [iframe_youtube video=“IFH-FqQlIWo”]

I don’t know why, but I’m interested in puzzles lately, and I thought it would be fun to create an app to let people post and fill out puzzles. Of course, I’ll have to limit how the puzzles work at first, but this should be a fun exercise in planning and implementing a site. And if I’m lucky, I might even have enough documentation at the end to actually get a few articles out of the idea. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. So the first thing I’ll be using is my newest note taking app on the iPad AbleNote. This app appears to have all the features that I was looking for in a note taking app. It’s kinda eerie making that blog post to the universe and then the next day (or maybe 2 I forget when I downloaded it) finding that app. True, it’s not free, but it seems to work better than the other one I was using. (That, while free, now has the “feature” of in-app purchases to try to entice me to pay them, um, yeah…). AbleNote wasn’t $9.99 - yay!

So, today I got fed up with my current iPad note taking app (Sundry Notes) crashing and taking my notes with it and decided to look for a new one. Wow! There are a lot of sticky notes, cork boards, and note taking / drawing apps out there! They could be a category all their own. EXCEPT They all do the same damn thing. Let me tell you, if you’re planning on creating a note taking app for the iPad, your app will not be “stupendous” “amazing” or “revolutionary” (no matter how many times you use those or other superlatives in your description) if all you have is the ability to write notes and change the background color/pattern of the paper. Here’s what I want from a note taking app:

It’s really hard to not feel like everyone in the universe is greedy for more more more when most of the apps that I used regularly on the iPhone have new, bigger iPad brethren that cost more, a lot more. I’m starting to think that apps that are universal will get an extra star from me, or maybe that apps that have an iPhone version that is cheaper than the iPad version would lose a star (or half a star?). I feel like I just bought DDH Software HanDBase for my iPhone/iPod. And now they have an iPad only version for $9.99. I’m sorry, DDH, but you won’t get my business a fifth time. I’ve bought the Mac desktop version (which is crap), the iPhone version, the Palm version, and the Windows desktop version. No way in hell are you getting another dime from me. Sorry, but your app works fine in the version I have, and since you didn’t see fit to make a universal app I don’t see fit to give you any more of my cash.

So, I love my iPad, don’t get me wrong. I love it so much that I set up all my email to go there as a way to stay curent and up-to-date with my mail even when I’m not at the “big-big-computer” as Jaryth calls it. But holy spam insanity, Batman! All of my accounts have spam filters on them at the server level. And they work at about 3 different effectiveness levels:

My 27" iMac has a shiny screen that is remarkably similar to my iPad (if slightly larger). And in the box of goodies that it came with was a fancy black cloth for keeping it shiny. However, since I don’t touch my iMac screen nearly as often as I do my iPad (except when I forget that it doesn’t have multi-touch built-in), so it doesn’t have as many fingerprints. So I liberated the cloth and it now travels with my iPad (along with the iMac’s bluetooth mini-keyboard. I kept my full-sized one with number pad, even though it has to be plugged in, gasp!). One other tip: the multitouch still works through the cloth, so it’s best to turn off when shining the iPad.

This is just too cool. So much easier to type on the iPad than the iPod. Plus it has all the help that the iPod has like the double space for a period and capital letter. Silly to be happy about that but I am. I’m trying a bunch of new apps for the iPad. I’ll have to give an update of all of them later. I’ve already watched a tv show, downloaded a book, and tried out a bunch of apps. I know, I’m gushing, but it really is just as cool as I thought it would be!!

So Mark found some analysis of possible prices for upcoming iPad apps and they are insane!! apparently they appear to be planning to charge anywhere from 2 to 4 times more for an iPad app as for the same app on the iPhone. TUAW is falling down by not reporting on this (or not asking in their interviews). They posted a “first look” at Polyhedra XL which I have the iPhone version. What a joke!

Okay, I’ve mentioned that I am looking forward to the iPad release. If nothing else, it will be nice to be able to type a little more accurately with my fat fingers. But I have to say that while it’s nice that a lot of developers are working on iPad specific versions of their apps, I hope they don’t all go that route. For instance, I have 2 ereaders on my iPod. I don’t want to have to go out and buy them AGAIN for the iPad. That would piss me off. Mark thinks that the apps should work, and I’m hoping that they will. But I am honestly convinced that most of the developers who are working on an iPad version of their products are doing so so that they can get more money out of me, and less because their app won’t work on the larger device. I also suspect that most iPad apps will cost more (if not significantly more) than their iPhone counterparts. It’s as if since the device is larger, they must charge more for their programs. Who knows, we’ll obviously have to wait and see, but I can tell you that something that I might have been willing to pay a dollar for (99cents) on my iPod is not necessarily something I’d be willing to pay $5 for (or more) just because now it’s bigger on the iPad. Don’t forget that app developers! I think one of the reasons the app store took off was because people would think “I’d buy that for a dollar” and then click, whirr, they’d have it on their phone. The saying isn’t “I’d buy that for 10 dollars.” Don’t get greedy, app developers. Stick with prices that are reasonable, and show us the benefit of paying 5-10 times more for your app on the larger device before you expect us to just open our wallets. We are still in a recession. Some apps I don’t plan to buy an iPad version of because I already have an iPhone version:

This latest version of MacJournal includes “support for syncing with MacJournal for iPhone” but the iPhone version isn’t available.

I’ve got a few apps on my iPod that would be so much more pleasant to use on a larger screen. Take this WordPress app for instance. I find it humorous that many of the complaints about the iPad are that it’s just a big iPod. That’s why I want one! Don’t get me wrong, I love my iPod. I use it everyday! But a larger screen to read and a bigger keyboard to type on would be awesome. I want a bigger iPod. Bring it on!