ipad

Apple's announcement of the iPad 2 today left me speechless in many ways, but maybe the most promising and awesome announcement was not the iPad itself, but rather iMovie and GarageBand for the iPad.

One thing that I've constantly had to do for video production is lug around my Mac, a camera, cables, etc., just because there was nothing that was as easy as iMovie to quickly hash out a video, with voiceover, etc. The iPhone's iMovie app is just not good enough for me, though it's great for a quick YouTube edit.

Luckily for me, all the work I've done in testing microphones and audio input adapters for the iPhone 4 applies directly to the iPad 2's audio input. You'll still need an adapter to get the audio into the TRRS input jack on the iPad, but being able to record to 8 tracks using GarageBand is completely amazing.

In the recent hubbub over Motorola Xoom pricing, I started to think a bit more about the current landscape of tablets on the market today—the iPad, and the competition.

Obviously, the iPad has won round 1. And it looks like round 2 is starting with Apple throwing all the punches—even though there's been no word on a second revision from the horse's mouth (yet).

But I was thinking to myself, "Why (and how?!) is Apple the only company selling a worthy $499 tablet." Apple's always been known to most people in the world as a luxury brand—and they are, in some senses—but why is Motorola introducing a tablet that retails for $799 minimum at launch, and will someday have a $599 version?

Motorola, and others in the 'actually working / almost shipping' tablet manufacturing market, probably see that the mid-range iPads are more popular than the cheap ones, and they target this price range/feature set. So, in a sense, what they're doing makes sense: target the large part of the bell curve of tablet sales, and make a great sub-$800 tablet.

However, I think they neglect to see one of Apple's greatest advantages: the upsell.

Every once in a while, I see a demo for an app that I truly believe will be a game-changing app for a certain field. This video is definitely like that, for the iPad and for DJs. Could you imagine ditching your laptop in favor of an iPad—not just out of convenience, but because the iPad actually does a primary computing function better than your laptop?

One can only hope for interesting and refreshing apps in every field (I'm personally waiting on Coda for the iPad...).

The new Blue Mikey (2.0) will not work with the iPhone 4 or iPad. It's a big letdown for me, as I don't really care if Blue can support previous-generation or outmoded equipment with their mics.

Their CEO, John Maier (no... not John Mayer...) said their engineers are hard at work increasing compatibility with iPhone 4 and iPad. Great. Maybe we'll see the Mikey 3.0 next year sometime. I'm not holding my breath.

I guess I'll stick to my own setup for recording audio on the iPhone 4. I was really hoping this Mikey revision would allow me to leave all my cables and mics behind, and stick with the Mikey alone, but that's not the case.

Posted over on Open Source Catholic: Celebrating the Holy Mass from an iPad. (Original story on WDTPRS; please comment on the OSC post linked above).

Today my iPad told me it was out of space. Not believing that for a second, I remembered that I had taken about 9 GB worth of RAW photos last weekend, and dumped them all on the iPad. I thought they were deleted by Aperture after I imported them, but I guess they weren't.

Lacking any easy way of deleting photos through Aperture's Import interface, or through Image Capture [Edit: Image Capture does allow 'select all' or 'batch selection' of photos to delete] (without having to reimport all the photos again), I found a useful shortcut to selecting tons of photos at once on the iPad for deletion.

Simply tap the share button to start selecting photos, then hold your finger down on a photo until it is selected (the little blue arrow shows up on the bottom right), and swipe your finger across multiple photos.

Nice!

After hearing about today's AT&T data plan pricing changes, I had a pretty bad gut reaction. After thinking more about the new options, I don't quite not what to think...

The new data plans are as follows:

Data Plus - 200 MB of data for $15/month. Additional 200MB for another $15.
DataPro - 2GB of data for $25/month. Additional 1 GB of data for $10.
Tethering - Additional $20/month for DataPro customers.

I logged into the 'myAccount' section of AT&T's mobile website, and looked up my usage stats (there's a link to view past data usage stats), and they were relatively surprising: