vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Tama left a comment round here expressing disappointment with the iPad. The name sucks, a rare misfire I guess (I mean, what kool aid are they on to not see how silly that is?) but this is something that has enormous interest for me. So, to answer Tama, why?

I’m not one of those who think the product has problems because it is missing stuff. Like the original iPod it will evolve over time, so let’s not expect it to be everything to begin with – there lies the path of Word and Windows. If it is going to work, it will work as it is, with or without a camera or whatever other thing you really wish it had. Then they can play with what may or may not be added to it (my gut reaction is a camera is silly, it is not something you’d wave around to take pictures with, so video would only be for conferencing).

I also believe the iPad Touch and iPhone have shifted the ground for us not because of the touch screen sexiness, but because of the apps. Just as the iPod worked because of iTunes, it is not just the hardware but the experience design and integration between managing your media and the device. With the touch devices the apps exploded all this so that it was dead easy to get apps on your device, and they would work. Period. They could use a map, GPS, the phone, to let you call a nearby hotel then show you how to get there. But what also happened with the app store is that in amongst all the carryon about Open Source and so on Apple have produced a (problematic but sort of working) model to let any maker, of any scale, make an app and sell it for peanuts. I mean paying $1.30 an app is nothing, a third of a cup of coffee, it is an entirely new financial model (though familiar from the sale of singles in the iTunes store) that works because of the scale provided.

Scenario One
Now, apply this to something like the iPad. I don’t care about buying books, all this technology – perhaps beyond listening to music – is about letting me make stuff and share it. So, the iPhone and iPod Touch has a pretty simple XHTL, Javascript and CSS structure to make media rich works. As far as I know this will port to the iPad. What this means is that, just as with apps (when any one could make something and get it distributed, and even generate an income from their labour and intellectual property) on the smaller devices (and with the original web) we can make the content. Imagine writing, whether collectively or individually, your course readings for the iPad. Links that will work, a screen you can read, you can embed video and audio examples. Text, images, links to published papers. You can distribute this as you like. It is just like the web, except for a particular platform, a platform that is sort of like a book. All we need now is for some simple to use bits of software that will do this for us, an inDesign for iPad and the touches. Design, export, package up, distribute. Don’t know if it is there but add the ability to address different documents (so that this essay or book can link to and know about that other one over there in the same collection) and some cool things can be written. Better yet, get this bit of software and invite your classes to write a media rich essay on something, and share that around.

Scenario Two
iPad is out there, not a lot going on right now except it is a fancy big screen iPhone. But the app developers are busy, building yet more hundreds of these nifty things. This one reads PDFs. It lets you annotate them. It can search and build an index. It can search and build a concordance with user definable attributes (the sentence that contains this term, the paragraph…). That’s version 1. Version 2 notices that you are annotating stuff around a particular term and using that term a lot, so it asks if you’d like the entire pdf library to be searched for this term, building a concordance for you. Sure. And then that concordance is exported as its very own PDF or document of choice. Contains all the mentions of the key term/phrase, where it came from, page number. So here I have my professional library on the device, just like I have my music collection on my iPod…

Scenario Three
I take my iPad to the lecture (or not, doesn’t really matter). The audio and video feed is via the network so I pick that up and use my iPad Lecture thing tool (yet to be made) to view it. I touch the image for the bits that I want to keep, not bothering with the rest which will be archived elsewhere anyway if I actually need it. Sometimes I just get the whole lecture and annotate it. Voice comments, links to relevant readings, or even links to other lectures.

Now it can’t do these things. But it can play video and audio. You can touch it. Lets see what you can do with it in 12 months. If it is just a device for playing back existing media, nah. That’s just a tricked up first generation iPod, sexy, sleek, benchmarks in use and experience. But if we can start writing for this as a platform (in the way the printing press helped create the possibility for the novel, by way of example), then we get that little bit closer to what our hypertext pioneers always wanted to see.