Lee Packham

I was very weak yesterday and picked up my iPad. Only had to queue for 15 minutes in the Regent Street Apple Store to get my little 16GB one. I didn’t see the need for anything larger, as I didn’t want to put any of my music collection on it – and still don’t.

Do I think the iPad will take off? It really depends what you mean by “take off” to be honest. Will the mass market of iPod/iPhone fanbois pick it up like never before? Yes, they will. It’s not even open for a debate that one. Will techies find good uses for them? Yes they will. Will management bods love it, most likely.

But… what is it for? I think first off, I’d like to do a Good, Bad and Ugly look at things:

The Good

It is fast. Very fast. It makes the iPhone 3GS look like a ZX-81 speed wise. Seriously. To top it off, it does this with amazing battery life. I just can’t drain the thing! The display is exceptionally clear and readable. It has a very wide viewing angle as well – but then most displays do these days. eBook reading is amazing. The Kindle App from Amazon is better than the in built iBooks app though. Why? Simple for the highlighting and notes to be honest. The Dropbox app also makes for an exceptionally nice integration with files and the desktop and makes up for what’s missing…

The bad

There’s no decent file sharing between your desktop and the iPad. You can use the iTunes, but that user interface is exceptionally clunky and you’re stuck with something quite ugly to try and manage  them with.

For some reason (although I remember the complaints now), the wireless is atrocious and really needs fixing. I’m using an Apple Airport Network and getting really shoddy signals when my laptop and phone have full.

There’s no iDisk app – which is a shame. But then, there’s Dropbox.

The ugly

This is probably me not used to it yet… typing. It’s horrible. I just can’t find a comfortable position to sit with the thing to type. I went to Starbucks to take it out into a reasonable life usage scenario and found that I couldn’t get comfortable with the thing. When reading I could get comfortable quickly – just writing/typing on the thing.

It’s a lot easier to type on the iPhone by comparison. I would say that typing on the iPad is on par with the Nexus One from HTC/Google. It works – but my God it’s awful.

Video playback is also not as ‘great’ as advertised. I happen to have Star Trek from iTunes and it really doesn’t display as advertised:

Whereas – Sherlock Holmes:

So when you see all those pictures of Spock/Sylar – take note; they are using the Crop feature built into the video player to show the video full screen properly.

Now – what’s the iPad for? I’ll be honest, I’m still really working that out. It’s a nicely constructed tablet – I think, in typical Apple fashion, they pushed it early. It’ll probably be a lot better with iPhone OS 4, when Multi-tasking will appear. That’s slated for a September, 2010 release. Hopefully they won’t follow the trait they did with the iPod Touch and charge for it!

I’ve only had the thing for a day though. Maybe I’ll figure out the usage scenario that works for me with it – beyond developing that is.

A couple of weeks ago, I had to implement Website Payments Standard on Green Man Gaming. Surprisingly, or maybe down to my lack of decent Google Skills, I was unable to find many decent implementations that did anything other than IPN or Website Payments Pro.

It may surprise people to know that there is another way other than IPN. That is, you can use what PayPal call the Name Value Pair API. In essence, a stack of POST calls. There is/was one implementation I found doing this with Django at Google Code – however, it wasn’t very pythonic and had a few bugs/bad things that don’t match the API. So… I forked it!

Naturally, I have left my fork open to for everyone else and it’s at github under the leepa/django-paypal-driver project. I hope it’s useful to others as well.

A little take on why the Microsoft Word way of handling styles is so much poorer than Apple’s equivalent. If only Pages had a great Track Changes system; I could then bin Word forver.

Betalogue » Blog Archive » Using styles in word processing: Apple’s Pages vs. Microsoft Word.

Last week, Green Man Gaming was launched and the world of digital distribution changed forever. I’m not just saying that because I’m one of the founders, I’m saying that because it really has done this.

There was a lot of people that doubted that it could be done from a technical point of view – and even why would publishers put games on the service? There was also a lot of SecuROM hating. In fact, I’ll briefly cover that now:

GMG doesn’t actually use any of the restrictive options of SecuROM bar one. The license reactivation of ‘x’ days. The value of x changes game to game depending on a number of different factors but all it really means is that the game just has to connect to the internet every few days. This is not the kind of constant internet connection that a certain publisher has been doing recently – but more the Spotify approach. That is, you can happy use the game offline – you just have to connect every now and again.

No Spyware is installed, nothing is actively hidden and tools are available from Sony DADC to remove any traces. I hate restrictive DRM, but since implementing SecuROM for Green Man Gaming, I can happily say that it got a bad name for reasons beyond Sony’s control. I’ve had no problems using it in VMWare/Parallels and in normal versions of Windows too. There’s been no tickets raised by customers on this topic either, which is great. Must be doing something right!

Turns out when I thought I fixed it, I hadn’t. The weekend saw the planned engineering work not appearing properly on the iPhone application. Thankfully I noticed this while I was working on the Android port.

This was fixed last night (bit late again, sorry about that). Sorry for any inconvenience caused by that. At least it’s fixed now I guess. I also noticed that the last_updated date of the DLR status wasn’t updating, even though the status itself was updating – that is now also fixed.