locally dense cloud ground fog

My new iPad arrived last Friday at around 4PM.  Normal FedEx deliveries are much earlier, but our delivery person said this was the "Apple holiday" and they were under huge strain delivering "boxes" from Apple.  She also noted an unusual percentage of recipients were home to sign for the packages.

 

This is my first iPad - white, 32GB and WiFi only for what its worth.  Sukie has an original model from early on and is a heavy user.  She doesn't see the need for anything newer or better as the old one, with its current software, is just fine as far as she's concerned.  She uses her a lot for almost anything you can imagine and I rarely get to use it.  That wasn't a big deal to me - I didn't see a big need for one until I learned about the new model.

 

no - it wasn't the display

 

I sketch quite a bit.  This is an important piece of how I think and I'm rarely without my pad and pencils.  I also sketch recreationally doing bits of what barely passes for art, but it is fun and relaxing and something I wouldn't give up.

 

A digital sketching interface is something I lust after.   I have a Wacom tablet for my Mac and have done some sketching and photoediting using it, but there is a disconnect between the stylus and image.  Wacom "solves" this with a very expensive display tablet - but they cost much more than a Mac and have some problems.   

 

iPads don't support a pressure sensitive stylus, although some hacks have been made - but they had issues.   It turns out the new iPad supports Bluetooth 4.0 which allows you to make such a device that would have good enough performance and interface with the iPad fairly transparently.  I had been talking to a small company that does a fantastic drawing program as well as another that will be doing the right sort of stylus.  The pieces aren't here just yet, but they'll be on sale within a few months.

 

So I ordered the iPad about ten minutes after the announcement event ended

 

There is something deeper going on which may give a bit of insight into Apple's direction. Over the weekend I sent a note about that to a few people and here is a slightly edited version:

 

I've been playing with the new iPad for over a day and have a sense this is something that will identify a major new direction for Apple.

Apple is very careful with product evolution. Of course they aren't perfect at the game, but they stay away from checklists of features that trip so many in tech, preferring to focus on real form and function. 

The core of the Mac was the notion of the Mac as a hub.  Their new major direction is not iOS devices, but rather the cloud (iCloud in their case) as core with Mostly Apple products attached. 

The cloud is not evenly distributed for a variety of reasons. A difficult part is what to do at a very local scale - what is the notion of cloud within a home and how is it distributed? I suspect Apple intends to crack this with WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0.

The new iPad has BT 4.0 which frankly is what pushed me over the top into a purchase. I do a lot of sketching and need a pressure sensitive stylus. The best approach without resorting to piano wire and chewing gum engineering is BT 4.0. It enables very simple lightweight short range communication links at very low power drains. Simple essentially means auto pairing. I'm doing that now with a prototype piece of kit I can't talk about - it just works and gives a sense of how all of your stuff can interact with apple devices in your house, office or factory. Sensors in everything at very low cost and Apple can deal with much of the difficult data management with the cloud let sharing structure they've developed.

Already I can get at all of my digital photos, video and music and play it on any of my Apple devices using AirPlay - our home has become a tiny WiFi interconnected ground fog that links directly to iCloud and indirectly to other public and private clouds.  BT 4.0 will make this *much* less expensive and I expect explosive third party development. It looks like the new Apple TV "hobby" box has a BT 4.0 capability in addition to WiFi.

Apple's challenge is to make sure this works transparently - so far they seem to be on the right path. This is really big - forget little things like Apple TV - they are a proper subset...

Oh yeah - the iPad is a excellent by itself - there are enough reviews that I won't waste your time with mine. But it is only part of the story and watching our little Apple fog expand so much showed me a bit of the possible future - a manifestation of something I worked on a decade or so ago.

 

This patchy but locally dense fog is a natural extension of the cloud idea and is also a natural play for Apple at this point.  You could execute it with any number of standards - just pick one or two and make them work.  Apple will do it with WiFi for the heavy lifting and BT for the lightweight and inexpensive communication with enabled devices - perhaps hundreds of them in your house.  It is just the beginning, but it is pretty stunning seeing how well sharing already works to TVs and stereos from any Apple device.  Just wait for the next level - the BT level - to take off.  There is incredible potential if they can pull it off and this goes way beyond the scale of much smaller markets like entertainment.

 

I hope others can offer some serious competition - the dream of what is needed and a few of the uses have been known for a long time, but Apple is the first company with a shot at it and there are signs they are engaged.    I suspect there will be uses we can't dream of now and this thing we call the Internet will become much more useful.

 

Comments

[Steve Crandall]

Someone asked what drawing app I like. Tools are a personal decision and I played with four be fore settling on Procreate. Several of these guys are looking to support pressure styluses. If you need to do pressure, I'd wait a few months ...