I know there’s a market preference for translating foreign movie titles (with some interesting rules and exceptions), so that, for instance, Sleepless in Seattle becomes “If we should meet by chance…”, etc, but I think you’ve really missed the point with this one:

カールじいさんの空飛ぶ家

For the kanji-impaired, that’s “Old Man Carl’s Flying House”.

As much as I would prefer a tablet computer to be an honest-to-gosh computer, rather than a media consumption device with support for small-scale commercial applications, I am not opposed to the concept of a “limited” device. I just think Apple has limited theirs too much.

What would be the killer app for me, something that would justify the cost of an iPad? A full-featured light table. Here’s the scenario:

It's 6am, and I'm out on the coast with a thermos full of hot tea, my best camera, a GPS tracker, and a tripod. I shoot the sunrise on the bay, mist and fog giving way to a sparkling ocean. When the light becomes too harsh, I pack up, find a restaurant for a late breakfast, and settle in to examine the fruits of my labor.

I plug first the tracker, then the camera into The Tablet, watching as it files away the RAW images and geotags the matching JPEGs for preview, and then I begin. Sort, arrange, compare, focus-check, rate, annotate, crop, rotate, and flag for further editing, all with a flick of a finger. Then off to the zoo for more pictures, and then lunch and more review.

Back at home, I plug The Tablet into my computer, and it syncs up with Aperture, seamlessly importing the RAW images with all of my annotations and edits intact. Any time I want, I can sync parts of my library back to The Tablet for further review.

Key elements:

• It uses the JPEGs for review, but imports the RAW images as well, and preserves the link between them. Apple's supplied Photo viewer won't do that.
• It supports standalone GPS trackers as a data source, which means reading USB mass-storage devices, something the iPad currently doesn't allow.
• It syncs to something other than iTunes, passing arbitrary data. Yeah, that doesn't work right now, either; most third-party apps have to sync through an ad-hoc wireless connection, which is painfully slow for this use.

It is genuinely new functionality, something I cannot do today on a desktop or laptop. There’s nothing in software right now that gives photographers the power they had with a light table, a loupe, and a box of slides. Sure, you can keep track of 50,000 images on your hard drive, but it’s basically just a poorly-edited dumpster. A real light table will teach you more about photography, your camera, your lenses, and your subject than iPhoto, Aperture, Lightroom, and Photoshop put together.

(all of this would be just as cool to have on a larger tablet computer, of course, especially a home machine with a 30-inch multitouch monitor/canvas, but one dream at a time)

[Update: Now that the camera-connection kit is out, there’s a little more information available. Not from Apple, sadly; their product description and documentation are still quite vague. Short version: it will import some raw formats into Photos, as well as some movie formats; it doesn’t appear to sync seamlessly back to iPhoto on a Mac, yet, but can be used as a manual import source; and it has some problems with MicroSD. So, not useless for my scenario, but still very 1.0 and limited. The surprising news is that people were able to connect USB headsets through it and get them to work; no thumbdrives, as expected, but at least they’re letting some data in, unofficially.]

Let me see if I’ve got the story straight: someone sees an unattended iPhone in a bar, takes it home, plays with it, figures out it’s a bit unusual, sends out feelers for a buyer, sells it to Gizmodo for an undisclosed sum, and the only person whose name makes the headline is the Apple employee who lost it.

Did I get that right? It looks like there are two honest-to-gosh criminals and a victim in this story, and the victim is the only one suffering.

I knew the guys at Gizmodo were shameless, but I hadn’t suspected that they were proud felons.

[Update: yup, Gizmodo bought from a thief, and they had to have known it. Based on the fact that the “finder” never even contacted the bar where it was lost, which the owner called every day hoping for news, Gizmodo’s little tale of innocent acquisition and honest attempts to return it looks completely phony.]

Two people at work bought iPads, and they weren’t the two I expected to have them so soon. So now I’ve spent a few minutes playing with it, and since they hadn’t downloaded many apps or bought much content, all I really got to see was its fundamental “big iPod Touch” functionality. This was not enough to persuade me to acquire one, for obvious reasons. And I already wasn’t impressed by the list of apps available at launch, and haven’t seen any exciting announcements since then.

All I can really say that I haven’t seen mentioned before is that they did one subtle thing to keep it from being dropped when held in one hand: there’s a slight lip around the front edge, keeping your thumb from sliding off the glass while your other fingers try to keep a grip on the smooth aluminum back. Without that, it’d be flying out of your hand faster than a strapless Wiimote in a bowling game. You don’t really want to hold it in one hand for very long anyway, but at least you’re not risking a cracked screen if you do.

For some reason, none of the other balloon animals want to play with Prickly Sue…

After a visit to the Cactus Garden at the Ethel M Chocolate Factory, this is one of the plants I want to have growing in my yard. I don’t know what it is, or how moisture-tolerant it is, but wouldn’t a front yard full of these make for a wonderful Halloween trick-or-treat experience?

Sadly, the “factory tour” doesn’t necessarily include having the factory be operational; it appears that it’s currently a Monday through Thursday thing, so if you see it advertised as part of a Hoover Dam or Lake Mead package, understand that you may just see a shut-down food line, without oompa-loompas or chocolate rivers. Go anyway, if you have any interest in cacti or special prices on chocolates.

(the other must-have from the garden is what I can only refer to as a “balloon-animal cactus”)

A while back, I sent my mother a link to Scratch, an educational programming environment for children. She’s one of the relatively few PhDs in the education field who really goes out and teaches children, so I knew she’d be interested. So were her kids; they love it, and they’re learning a lot more than just how to write programs.

Naturally, someone released an iPhone/iPad app to allow a user to run their Scratch programs. The response from the MIT folks who run Scratch was “hey, check this out”. That was early March. Yesterday, as part of their new policy outlawing all third-party development tools, Apple removed it from the app store.

Nice work, Steve; way to throw out a dozen babies with the (Adobe CS5-flavored) bath water. If you were trying to improve the quality of apps in the store, oh, who am I kidding, we both know that’s a bullshit rationalization. Gruber bought it, and preened when you made him think he was a penetrating analyst for saying so, but it ain’t so. The app store is flooded with crap, and is such a poor shopping experience that customers are forced to wade neck-deep into the sewers to find the tiny handful of useful apps (this is what Gruber calls “the killer app” for the iPad; no doubt he also thinks dumpster-diving would be a great first date).

It’s about control. About forcing people to do things The Steve Way. With Flash CS5, tens of thousands of Windows-based developers would have been able to write iPhone and iPad apps, and Steve would rather require the price of development to include the price of a Mac. Apple is, as we’re often reminded, first and foremost a hardware company. The change was timed to fuck Adobe’s major release, but that was just a bonus.