fplanque: IT world

I was at a conference in Amsterdam last week and although we don’t have the iPads in Europe yey, I had the opportunity to play for 15 minutes with an iPad brought by a US attendee.

My first impression was: it’s really nicely designed, extremely intuitive and responsive. I gotta get one. I also loved the little switch to lock the orientation. Super useful for reading while lying on your side in bed! (Unlike on the iPhone)

However, after a few minutes I started to realize that a) I don’t quite know how to hold that thing (whether with or without the Apple carrying case) and b) it’s getting damn heavy if you hold it in your hand. Those impression were shared by the owner as well as the other people who played with it.

I believe this is going to limit how much you actually want to use that device in different situations. I think it’s actually very impractical to use when you don’t sit down. Also, I believe Apple should actually drop the stupid glass screens: they’re heavy and the glare is just annoying!

Anyways, until then it looks like the Apple product segmentation goes like this:

• If you’re standing, use your iPhone
• If you’re sitting in an armchair, couch or other laid back situation, use your iPad
• If you’re sitting at a table, use your MacBook
• If you’re sitting at your workdesk, use your iMac or Mac Pro

Ah yes, also:

• If you want to watch something on your TV, use your Apple TV or better yet: Mac Mini.

There’s 2 problems to mouse speed:

• The acceleration curve of the mouse mouvement which I’ve talked about before
• maximum mouvement speed

The maximum speed can be set through the System preferences panel, but even when the slider is all the way to the right, the speed may be too slow… especially if you line up 3 monitors side by side.

You can get faster speeds through the Applications > Utilities > Terminal. To see the current setting, type in this:

defaults read -g com.apple.mouse.scaling

To make the mouse faster, set a different value, for example:

defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling 6

Do you remember the days where you'd carefully read through everything your RSS aggregator collected for you? Do you still do that? Do you even open your RSS aggregator? Do you even use one?

Chances are you're using twitter by now. 140 characters max per tweet. And you don't even read them all! You just skim through them.

Way too much information of course.

And yet, many people still write incredibly long blog posts with fancy writing & diluted content. Even bloggers who tweet their posts to twitter. They should know better... I don't want to point at anyone in particular; just click on the averag elink in twitter and see if you want to read all that text...

I'm willing to bet that 95+% of the people who click through from twitter to a blog post do not read that post in its entirety. We have to make those posts shorter!

I just have to say how much I love the way iMovie '09 handles video files.

When you import video, you can save it to any drive connected to your Mac. It will go to a folder named "iMovie Events" on the selected partition.

Whenever that partition gets full and you want to move to a larger drive, you can just move the files to another partition and relaunch iMovie. it will find the files in their new location, no questions asked! And your iMovie projects will continue to work without asking where the source files are.

I wish every piece of software made things just as easy as that

How many times have you heard "Time is Money"? It's getting pretty old and boring, isn't it?

Well here's a new thought: Time is just like Money! Especially: you can't just wait until you find it... if you want some, you have to make it! And in both cases: you have to develop skills to do that!

Think!