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We can’t say which store we went to, but we had a discussion with an Apple store employee, and they admitted that the demand for iPad is equal to the crazy-train crowds we experienced with the iPhone 3G launch day. Not quite a surprise, as we’ve leaned closer to the launch day, analysts have been upping their numbers and estimates of what Apple will sell within this quarter and end of year sales.
We were scoping out the logistics for launch day, which doors have the shortest route to the Apple store entrance, and thought we’d get the skinny (if there was one,) on what the Apple store employees were hearing about it. But, alas they said they too are in the dark about most of it…but they did agree when we said, “It’s pretty clear that the demand is nothing like what pundits had originally thought,” to which they replied, “It’s as big as the launch of the 3G iPhone.”
But of course we don’t have details, making us much like the WSJ – Nope, we’re empty – John Gruber seemed to have some though, quote, “And they have no actual details of the next-generation iPhone. Nothing. Not the A4-family CPU system-on-a-chip. Not the 960 × 640 double-resolution display. Not the second front-facing camera. Not even the third-party multitasking in iPhone OS 4. All they have is that there’s going to be a new iPhone this summer, period.”
We reside in Portland, Oregon, and have 3 Apple retail stores. One at Pioneer Place, Washington Square and Bridgeport Village. We’re camping out at the Pioneer Place Apple store, come rain, snow, sleet or hail! The last time we did this was for the iPhone 3G, after waiting an entire year for the second gen. – which proved to be very fruitful.
Way back then, I personally could not have imagined how much the iPhone would change my life, and it has become an issue in my relationship at times. My other half named my iPhone, “Precious” as in Lord of The Rings’ Gollum. However, I think the same is going to be true for the iPad – we have no idea what awaits us in the future, what apps will be created, and if any of them will be strictly iPad-only-unique. We’ll see!
So, let us know, Are you camping out in line for the iPad? If so, where and when will you set up shop?
Kotaku.com has an amazing list with screenshots of the games coming to iPad! We’ve posted some here, and I’ve gotta say, this just stokes the iPad frenzy fire to a blaze…My favorite, if true, is Ms. PacMan…it hasn’t come to the Wii yet, and I love this game! Given the iPad screen real estate, this is just gonna rock on so many levels!
One of the intriguing things that stands out to me is IUGO’s Cliffed XL – Why? The two player spit screen of course! Just like the old table video games back in the day (80’s, yeah!) Here’s the description: Race to the bottom in this 2D scrolling racer. The iPad version will feature head-to-head split screen mode so two players can race on a single device. There are also new characters, improved graphics and new backgrounds.
Wow! I’m pretty sure we’re late to the party, but after seeing this Apple geek’s performance, I had to post it here. She shows us how the magic is done to get the iPhones playing many of the instruments on their own, while she strums the iPhone guitar and sings the song…that’s the nugget surprise, her voice is amazing!
Mac Daily News tipped us off on Pad Gadget’s reveal of approved iPad apps. Pad Gadget was tinkering around the iTunes HTML pages, and reported this:
You won’t find any of these iPad titles using your standard iTunes browser, you need to use Apple’s more recent web interface to find the new titles mixed in with the thousands of regular iPhone and Touch titles.
We did a quick scan and were able to find several titles clearly marked as “HD”, a common label developers are now using to indicate an iPad specific version of their app. HD is not a universal title for iPad apps, some developers are instead choosing “XL” to denote their iPad version or simply creating a universal build so that both the iPhone and iPad versions are contained in a single app. There are probably many more titles in the database that have been approved by Apple for the iPad that we haven’t yet stumbled upon. The whole story and the list of titles they found are here…
App Annie has published screenshots of the Apple iTunes iPad store – I suspect that we’ll be seeing quite of few “leaks’ such as this until April 3rd. App Annie stumbled across the iPad app store feed, and found an interesting twist:
Even more interesting is that there are already some apps listed in the iPad-specific top ranking charts for top paid, free, and grossing apps. Among the apps listed are “HD” versions of Labyrinth 2 and Flight Control, and we’ve taken screenshots of each of the charts here: for Free/Paid, and Grossing. Full post here, along with other screenshots.
Ironic: As I had just posted about Apple training it’s customers to use touch, first with the iPod, later the iPhone and now the iPad – I go out to my mailbox and find my April issue of FastCompany, and what do I see? The cover on your left! Crazy. Both kids are holding iPhones…both of the twin girls declare inside, “I love it so much!”
From playing games that let them learn math, books that read themselves, to word building and vocabulary, children are learning on all sorts of devices including the iPhone. We all may remember the Youtube video of the 3 year old working the iPhone, and now 1 yr. olds are doing it. FisherPrice released three iPhone apps for 3 yr. olds just this month, See’n Say, Little People Farm, and Chatter Telephone.
The article goes in-depth about how these tech devices are teaching our children in ways that truly engage and have results (learning.) Again, if you look at Apple’s big picture, you can see how this was all in the cards from the beginning. Look at all the websites that are built for kids 3 yrs. and up: Sesame Street.org, Discovery Education and Dreambox learning are among those that you could easily see being ported to devices like the iPhone or iPad. When I’m able to, I’ll link the article so you can see it in-depth.
Marco Arment has published some screenshots of what Instapaper for iPad will look like, and dare I say it’s mouth-watering and I got giddy all over again about the iPad. Yep, my religious faith is even stronger now.
(Briefly – Instapaper is an iPhone and browser app to save online articles to “Read Later,” saving just the text so you can read it offline if you wish.It’s kind of like a bookmarking app, but better, although this is one way I use it. Arment has added a browser within Instapaper, so if you’d like to see the original web-page, you can, which is handy. I lamented on my bad habit of using Instapaper a bit too furiously, hence my experiment to capture all of my Instapaper links in Evernote.)
What does it look like on the iPad? Well, to your left is one of the shots, not a lot of change. You can see more shots here. What’s interesting is the issue he’s having with iPad, one that other developers are facing: taking the gamble of submitting the app and relying on Apple to let him know if it will work or not. See, no one has an iPad to test their app on, sans the few who were chosen to re-work their app for the iPad reveal. That’s a big gamble, and one that few might take. Or will they?
Arment’s process is intriguing too: everyone that purchased Instapaper Pro for iPhone will get the features that the iPad version has, and iPad owners who already have the Pro version won’t have to pay twice for the iPad version. Pretty sweet! As he puts it:
When everyone else was stalling their iPhone development for months in order to redesign entire applications for the iPad, I made the obligatory cardboard prototype and mocked up a bunch of radical interface departures.
Ultimately, none of them were very practical. Some worked well, but only with ideal content (which, in practice, is rarely the case except in the Editor’s Picks folder). And I didn’t want to commit to any huge risks because I don’t have an iPad to test them on.
Once I nailed down a few definite iPad-friendly features, I realized that I could port all of them to the iPhone version of Instapaper Pro. And if I did that, all of my customers (and I) could use these great new features now.
So, rather than rewriting my entire interface for the iPad over the two months that we’ve had, I spent the first few weeks finishing and launching the 2.2 update to my iPhone app, a major undertaking that added a lot of great features, using techniques that would allow me to easily adapt all of the features to the iPad. And I spent the remaining time adapting my interfaces, rewriting or modifying where necessary, for this new platform.
I’m in love with Instapaper all over again, and I’m so giddy about what other app developers are doing. I’ll be writing more about what I have devoured over the past three weeks on the iPad and what is going to happen – with print media especially, and other app developers.
Here’s a brief note I’ve written that will be the base of what I’ll soon publish in several postings about the iPad and what it will mean to tech field:
The funny thing that everyone seems to forget about Apple – they have a “big picture” strategy, one that i am often reminded of as more leaks come out, and more products are released. The iTunes eco-system is one of the biggest parts of this “big picture” strategy. Techies rarely remember this – when the iPod came out, the same things were said about it that they are now saying about the iPad. If Apple has invested this much into a product, you can bet they have so many tricks up their sleeve that no one can predict what’s next…but you can count on the fact that there is a much bigger picture here. Bigger than one product.
With iTunes, Apple taught us all how to download music and how to use touch to control our iPods (well, with what is now deemed the “Classic” with touch pad.) With the iPhone, they went ballistic in giving us an amazing machine. They taught us how to interact with a touch screen, though small, but we were trained. When the App store appeared, no one could have predicted what “we” did with that. Just as iTunes for music before it, the App store was what drove iPhone adoption from the 3G on.
And now…we have a new product that everyone knows how to use, with a much bigger screen. When I say everyone, I mean everyone. TYou’re grandmother knows how to use it, your child…everyone knows how to touch and make gestures with their hands and fingers. All of those grandmothers, children and teens who have someone in their life who have an iPhone? They’ve all been trained, one could say more so.
I don’t know about you, but I have a bad habit of bookmarking a lot of articles. But there’s a reason I say it’s a bad habit. I bookmark with an app called InstaPaper. InstaPaper is a great little app that simply allows you to save the online articles you’d like to “Read Later.” Big deal you say…well, you can read these articles without Wi-Fi or 3G access, InstaPaper stores them locally on your iPhone to read offline.
Now, enter the media and RSS firehose, Twitter accounts (I have 3,) Facebook and you have a lot of material that might interest you. Me? I fall into the habit all too often of saying, “Read Later,” because somewhere in my brain I think I’ll have the time to read everything I send to InstaPaper. Fortunately (although, that depends on your point of view) InstaPaper only holds 500 articles. I wasn’t aware of this, and to my dismay one day, I was looking for an article and couldn’t find it. That’s when I discovered the cap, which the developer clearly states (and is right) is plenty. If you have over 500 saved articles in InstaPaper, how many do you think you’ll actually get to?
For me it’s a bad habit, chug-a-lugging on the never empty fire hose of content coming at me from all sides. How could I possibly read all of these things? I can’t, but somehow I slide into the habit of pushing that “Read Later” button. It’s pretty easy to say, “Oh wow, this is great! I don’t have time to read the whole thing, I’ll just set it aside for later.”
I have found a way to have my cake and eat it too: Evernote. Evernote is another great app for iPhone and Mac desktop that allows you to throw everything you want to remember into organized “notebooks.” This has become as embedded in my work-flow and life that it might as well be implanted in my forearm…oh wait…I’d want my iPhone there first… but I digress. Evernote’s notebooks are filled with what are called “Notes” and they can be anything from a screen shot, and entire web page in PDF format (yes, it let’s you do that,) and it even read text in photos. If you want to know more, go here, a post I wrote a while back about the app.
The other day, I thought I’d try a little trick I’ve been doing with Evernote on my desktop. Sometimes I just do a “select all,” copy and paste (for Evernote there are special keystoked for this,) and I have that shipped to Evernote for safe keeping. While on my InstaPaper page in Safari on my desktop, I did the same thing, just for fun to see what happened. BOOM! My entire insanely long page of article links, right into Evernote, all in one note! Amazing! Now those article links that were near the 500 or 499 mark, are saved forever! Not exactly pretty, but they’re saved…
Now, being a scholar of all in the GTD (Getting Things Done) way of thinking, it may not be good for me, but it’s cool nonetheless. Just because I can do it, doesn’t really mean I should. But hey, if I’m ever in a pinch, I’ll know what to do. How do you use Evernote or InstaPaper?
We can’t say which store we went to, but we had a discussion with an Apple store employee, and they admitted that the demand for iPad is equal to the crazy-train crowds we experienced with the iPhone 3G launch day. Not quite a surprise, as we’ve leaned closer to the launch day, analysts have been upping their numbers and estimates of what Apple will sell within this quarter and end of year sales. 
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