Posts about Tablet

My Thoughts on the iPad

toby ho — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 01:33:07 -0600

I've followed engadget's live blog, seen the keynote video, listened to Tom and Molly talk about it, even read others' opinions on engadget, gdgt and twitter, etc etc. I guess you could say I am pretty excited.

The tech savy(engadget, gdgt, BOL, etc) are in general underwhelmed or disappointed. Below are some of the complaints I have heard:

No Webcam or microphone - which pretty much rules out using Skype on it, which would have been a great killer app at this form factor. I think they will add these to the iPad in the future. Update: actually, there IS a built-in microphone, so at least you can make audio calls with Skype.
Still No Flash Support - you cannot seriously claim it has the best web browsing experience when it doesn't support Flash! Apple has not allowed Flash to run on the iPhone all this time. Now that they are doing the same with the iPad - which with it's larger screen you would think would be much better suited to run Flash apps, and add to it the fact that Flash has never ran great on Macs, it's becoming obvious that this is political. Apple wants to fight a format war with Adobe. Why would you need flash when you can buy great apps from the app store and buy TV shows and movies from iTunes? On the other hand, I can also see the concern that almost all of the flash apps out there(possibly with the exception of Flash ads) just aren't designed for the touch screen, and having users run them on the iPhone or the iPad degrades the user experience and therefore could hurt the products' reputation. Apple's PR, however, is going with: "it could rapidly drain battery life", which I think is probably in reality 3rd or 4th down on their list of concerns.
No multiple tasks/apps/windows - this is a pretty big one: given the iPad's screen real estate, it seems artificially limiting to not allow multiple apps to be running in separate windows. I believe the iPad will eventually have this feature. How the UI will turn out will be interesting to see.
The App Store Sucks - Apple prevents certain types of applications from entering its App Store. One example is programming language interpreters; another is any app that Apple views as overstepping their core apps' boundaries. Given that the iPad is even more of a computer than the iPhone, these limitations may become even more glaring.
I just don't see the need - "I already have a laptop and a smartphone, there just isn't any more room for yet another device!" I think that at the moment the iPad is more exciting for developers than consumers, but that will change.

All the negatives are well and good, but I overlook all of them, because, from my point of view, the iPad - and what it will lead to - is much bigger. All of the tablet computers I've seen in stores in the past - HP's, Fujitsu's, etc: they all suck. These computer manufacturers created tablet computers but installed on them an Operating System which is design from the ground up for use with a mouse and a keyboard. They figured: "A tablet computer has a stylus. We can use it as a pointing device in the same way that a mouse is a pointing device. We just hook up the stylus driver to control the pointer, and boom! We got ourselves a tablet Operating System! Brilliant!" This is understandable, because it is the nature of software engineers to want to build solutions that solve as many problems as possible - and Windows is a very very big solution indeed. However, this tendency also causes brilliant people to routinely produce crap. The tablet form factor is more versatile than the mouse, and can be much more natural to use from a UI standpoint, but dumbing it down and retrofitting it to an inferior UI paradigm caused it to be marginal. Yes, you could use a tablet to draw, sign documents, take notes, etc, but when it came to interacting with the UI elements, it was usually very kludgy.

iPad is the first tablet I've seen that comes close to realizing the potential of the tablet form factor. Why? It's all about the software, stupid! The software that come with the iPad were designed and written specifically for the large multi-touch screen device. This is to take nothing away from the amazing hardware. Multi-touch was ground breaking when it first surfaced. When the iPad comes to market, it will be the single best showcase of multi-touch technology. But, the software is what brings it all together, and you can tell Apple put a lot of time and effort into the software. Okay, enough of my rambling. What am I really trying to say?

iPad marks a historical step towards our liberation from mouse pointers and a paradigm shift in computer technology.

I hereby reiterate my prediction that in 5 to 10 years, mice will be on the way to extinction.

Simulating a Tablet Using the Touchpad

toby ho — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:30:09 -0600

I came across OS X's Chinese Trackpad Handwriting input method the other day, and was really impressed. Once you activate the handwriting mode(hotkey: Ctrl-Shift-Space), the mouse pointer disappears, and you can use write your chinese character on your trackpad using your finger. The UI looks like this:

What's interesting to me is the buttons on the left and right of the character recognition area. It took me a while to figure out how to use them at first, but after some experimentation, I figured it out: basically, the pretty gray box corresponds to your trackpad, and so to press a button on the upper left corner, you would tap the area in the upper left corner of your trackpad, and so on and so forth. It is very intuitive really. I would even say brilliant. Essentially, the trackpad has been made to work just like the Vistablet or any of the tablet accessories you can get from the Apple store these days.

Which got me thinking, how far can we take this? Can we use this to say...draw? A couple of google searches later, I discovered the Inklet from Ten One Design. The Inklet is an application, which is primarily used with a stylus you can buy from the same company called the Pogo Sketch.

The Pogo Sketch is a pressure sensitive stylus that works with the Apple trackpads as well as the iphone and ipod touch. With Inklet and the Pogo Sketch together, you basically have the features of Vistablet. Here's their demo using Photoshop:

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Brilliant, brilliant stuff. Another why-didn't-I-think-of-that moment for me. The lesson from all of this is that, at least for the new Macs, you can do a lot more with the trackpad than you thought(or at least I thought). For some types of applications, it may make sense to completely do away with the mouse pointer and use a tablet-style interface instead, and we can do this NOW! (Yes, now - three days before the imminent release of the Apple Tablet). Tablet doubters, just you wait, tablets will be the way of the future. In 5-10 years(oh this could be another Fourcast prediction), the mice could be heading towards extinction. Just you wait.

书法with Vistablet

toby ho — Sun, 11 May 2008 03:33:53 -0500

I bought avistablet today. And I found that with it you can write 书法，and I am taking advantage of it. Here's my first attempt.

书法with Vistablet

toby ho — Sun, 11 May 2008 03:33:53 -0500

I bought avistablet today. And I found that with it you can write 书法，and I am taking advantage of it. Here's my first attempt.

书法with Vistablet

toby ho — Sun, 11 May 2008 03:33:53 -0500

I bought avistablet today. And I found that with it you can write 书法，and I am taking advantage of it. Here's my first attempt.

Fujisu Tablet

toby ho — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 10:12:31 -0600

I went to fry's today and was able to play a bit with the Fujisu tablet there. I was quite impressed. One thing I learned what that you can actually "pen over" the screen. The pointer follows your pen as you hover it over the screen as long as it's sufficiently close to the screen(probably about an inch). The Fujisu tablet goes for about 2k, almost 1k more than the hp.

Tablets are the way of the future

toby ho — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:02:50 -0600

After watching some old Alan Kay videos, I started thinking about modeless interfaces and tablet PC's. I think that the tablet PC has been largely under-appreciated, but is a form factor that has a lot of potential. The reason that it was under-appreciated, in my opinion, is - at least partly - because of the software. The operating system on most of the tablet PCs in the market is windows, but the version of windows installed on the machines is not any different from any other windows. Aside from some duck-tape-like software to allow for hand writting recogition and a few other features, there's really very little work that's been put into making the software working great with the form factor. With the hype of multi-touch screens, I think conditions are ripe for a comeback for tablets if the right things happen. Apple has the best chance of making it work: doing with tablets what they did with mobile phones, plus they already have multitouch technology on their side, so it's a natural match.

Now, why tablets? How did I settle on that? I guess it started with a video Kay show of a modeless interactive system which uses a stylus. It was some sort of flow-chart editor. The main thing is that it was modeless. To create a box, you didn't have to go and select the box tool, no, you just draw a box in the shape of a rectangle. And to make a port on the box, you just draw it on the edge of the box. To write text in the box you just scribble it. To connect 2 boxes you just draw a line from the edge on one to a edge of another. Why don't we have more interfaces like this today? In photoshop, in order to do anything at all, you usually have to be aware of being in a combination of at least 3 different kinds of modes: your selection, your tool selection, and the current layer. Plus, with many of the actions you take, modal dialogs popup afterwards to asks you for parameters you want before anything actually happens. This is why doing anything in Photoshop feels like such a hassle. Well, okay, that's more of a user interface issue than about the tablet, but that's what inspired it. What's special about the tablet form factor, I think, is that the stylus gives you better control of fine movements than the mouse, and therefore allows you to draw more accurate shapes, which allows you to better articulate what you mean to the machine, with which programs can better detect gestures. That's why graphic artists prefer tablets to regular laptops, after all. You may have concerns that using a stylus freehand tires your wrist, but there's no reason why you cannot rest your palm on the surface: in fact I tried out the HP tablets at Fry's the other day and resting your palm while writting does not interfere at all. The second thing that's major about the tablet form factor is the emergence of multi-touch. There isn't a major multi-touch tablet in the market today, but Apple already has the iphone and the Macboox Air - which allows you to use iphone-like gestures on the touchpad. If you haven't played with the iphone, the multi-touch hand gestures like swipe, flick, pinch, and spread, are phenomnonal in terms of user-happiness. These gestures are intuitive, easy to use, immersive, and...modeless. Many iphone users have complained after going back to their macbook, that they can't use these gestures anymore. It's pretty obivious now that macbooks from now on will all have multi-touch enabled touch pads. Now, you might ask me, you like the stylus, and then you are talking about multi-touch, are we going to use the stylus or our fingers? I am just saying...we use both. In fact, one hand could be using the stylus while the other could be making gestures. Imagine, for example, editing a long document using the stylus like a pen, and swiping with the other hand to scroll the document. Now, you may object and say: you still need a keyboard. Well, I agree, and the reason is that you can type faster with a keyboard than you can write with a pen. But, with the asterisk that this is not the case with everyone, only people who can type well. If you can't type faster than you can write, then you don't need a keyboard at all! Wow! Then all you need is a giant size touch-screen. But for touch typists, yes, you will need a keyboard, otherwise you will be sacreficing a lot of speed. I don't know, will this be a slide out, or a fold up? Not really sure. What about one handed keyboard? I personally have a thing for one-handed keyboards.

Anyway, that's my vision of the future, and I think Apple obiviously stands the best chance of making it happen, but personally I don't really care who does it. Will it happen? Well, I was right about the iphone before, so...